


Something I Can Never Have

by KouriArashi



Category: Teen Wolf (TV)
Genre: Angst, BAMF Stiles, Character Death, Dark, Emissary Stiles Stilinski, F/M, Future Fic, M/M, Magic, POV Peter Hale, Peter Has Feelings, Revenge, Slow Burn, Witches, before the story starts anyway, but is still a gigantic jerk
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-02-02
Updated: 2014-05-01
Packaged: 2018-01-10 23:32:28
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence, Major Character Death
Chapters: 13
Words: 61,180
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1165900
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/KouriArashi/pseuds/KouriArashi
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>It's been over five years since the last time Peter Hale left Beacon Hills, when Stiles shows up on his doorstep. The pack has been killed, Stiles is the only survivor, and Peter is going to help him get his revenge whether he likes it or not...</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

> Okay, so, wow. This is so dark. It is SO DARK. This is probably the darkest thing I have ever written/possibly will ever write. Pretty much all the main cast is dead before the story starts and Stiles is seriously screwed up. Buuuut on the upside BAMF!Broken!Stiles and Snarky-but-reluctantly-impressed!Peter are a really awesome pairing, in my personal opinion at least. 
> 
> Future fic, canon-compliant through season 3A. I haven't seen any of season 3B so I can't be held responsible for whatever Peter is up to there. =D
> 
> Title has been stolen from a frighteningly appropriate Nine Inch Nails song.
> 
> Am rating this 'explicit' because it will be, eventually, trust me. I mean, Peter's involved, what do you want.

 

Werewolves had a tendency to avoid cities. They made them feel pent-up, restless, claustrophobic. That made downtown Los Angeles an ideal place for Peter Hale to have settled. He liked the walls, the crowds, the anonymity of it all. He liked not knowing any of his neighbors’ names, and the fact that they couldn’t care less about his comings and goings. He liked knowing that the nearest werewolf who wasn’t in his pack was a hundred miles away and had no reason to come anywhere near him.

It was strange to have a pack again after all these years, but after finally having regained his alpha status, he wasn’t about to risk it. Derek was out of the question for a variety of reasons. Cora was a better fit, but after she and Derek had left for Brazil, he hadn’t seen much of them. They weren’t exactly the ‘keep in touch’ sort, and truth be told, Peter had no real interest in keeping track of them.

Instead his pack was made up of like-minded strangers. Wolves who knew omega was dangerous, who knew that being in a pack increased their power, but who had no interest in the touchy-feely _family_ part of being in a pack. A few of them were people he had turned himself, but most of them were wolves that he had met in his travels. They saw each other enough to satisfy the bare minimum requirements of keeping their pack bonded, connected. But for the most part, Peter was alone, and he liked it that way.

So when there was a knock on his door at about ten thirty on a Thursday night, he was surprised. His neighbors never came calling, and anyone in his pack or from his work would have called or texted first. He half-expected it to be the police, looking into some sort of crime that had been committed in the building and canvassing for witnesses. But when he opened the door, the young man there was anything but a police officer.

It took Peter a few moments to recognize him. Stiles had changed a lot in the intervening years. Peter had left Beacon Hills when Stiles was nineteen, going to college in San Francisco but commuting home every weekend. The nemeton attracted so many supernatural nasties that Scott had been forced to give up on the idea of college entirely. Peter had no idea if Stiles or anyone else in that pack had ever managed to graduate.

He was the same height, but other than that, almost nothing was the same. His hair had grown out – not the spiky look that he had favored in late high school, but longer, down around his face and thoroughly unkempt. He had lost a lot of weight – both recently and rapidly, if Peter was any judge. His face was gaunt, skin pale from being indoors too much, eyes sunken with little half-moon smudges underneath them. His lips were pale, too, and ragged from having been chewed on.

If it hadn’t been for the constellation of moles across his face, and the plaid shirt, Peter didn’t think he would have recognized him at all. Nor did he have any idea why Stiles was darkening his doorstep. He started with the important things. “Is there a barber shortage in Beacon Hills?”

Stiles, who had always been so quick to snipe and snark with him, just gave him a blank look and said, “What?”

That, more than his appearance, was a sign to Peter that something was actually, seriously wrong. He hesitated, then against his better judgment, stepped back to let the teenager – Peter found he still thought of him that way even though he had to be in his mid-twenties by now – into the apartment. “To what do I owe the pleasure?” he asked.

“Scott’s dead.” Stiles said the words in a completely flat tone of voice. “Allison, too. The whole pack. Lydia . . . Isaac . . .”

Peter regarded him for a few moments. It didn’t really surprise him. Fighting the way Scott did, trying to live by his code of morals in their world, was a sure way to get killed sooner rather than later. Quietly, he said, “Derek?”

Stiles shook his head a little. “He wasn’t there. I haven’t seen him in years. Not since he and Cora left for South America.”

It was a small relief. Peter wouldn’t cry if his niece and nephew were killed, not really, but he did take some comfort in knowing he wasn’t the last Hale. “And you came here to tell me this news because . . .”

Stiles looked up. His mouth twisted in agony, and he said, “You know why I’m here.”

Peter realized that he did. There was only one reason Stiles would seek out him of all people. They weren’t friends. They hadn’t spoken in years. But Stiles knew what Peter had done to those who had killed his family, his pack. He thought about this for a few minutes while he went into the kitchen and took out a bottle of whiskey and two shot glasses. He filled one and slid it over to Stiles, who gulped it back without comment or question.

“How did you find me?” he finally asked.

“Get real,” Stiles said. “I’ve known where you set up shop for years. I even sent Derek your address in case he ever needed you, but I guess he didn’t.”

Peter refilled Stiles’ shot glass and took a sip from his own. He continued to study Stiles in silence. He could see the raw grief on his face, now that he was looking for it, and it reminded him uncomfortably of his own past. The urge to simply throw Stiles out of his apartment and tell him ‘good luck with the vendetta’ was strong. But he didn’t do it. “What happened?”

Stiles gave a little shrug and just said, “Witches.”

“You survived, though.”

“Scott got between me and them.” Stiles took another gulp of whiskey. “I was still hurt, though. Bad. I got away. Crawled. I don’t remember a lot of it. But I guess I got to the Nemeton, because otherwise I would be dead.”

Peter sipped his whiskey, watched as Stiles ignored his glass and just went straight for the bottle. “You couldn’t do anything like that when I left.”

“Yeah. I’m a full-fledged Druid now. Deaton trained me up right, before he and his sister left town. Scott, you know . . .” Stiles choked on the words. “He was just so _good_. And he was powerful, you know, all that True Alpha stuff was a big deal. I was his emissary, and we worked with my dad so we could get the law involved when we needed to, and Beacon Hills . . . it was a good place to be. Even with the Nemeton attracting all sorts of crazy shit. We handled it. But we couldn’t handle everything.”

“That’s a sad story,” Peter said. “So. Just to be clear. You want my help destroying the people who killed your pack.”

Stiles nodded. “It’s a coven. There are thirteen of them. They’ve changed Beacon Hills. Even in just a few weeks . . . I was in the hospital for almost two months. Scott and the others were killed about six months ago, and things are different now. Bodies are turning up every week. People don’t go out after dark anymore. They don’t talk about it. But everyone knows that something’s changed.”

“Well,” Peter said, “I’m not interested.”

Stiles just looked at him.

“Oh, you didn’t see that coming?” Peter smiled at him. “This isn’t my business, Stiles, and I have no reason to help you. Let alone to risk my life fighting an entire coven of witches, so _you_ can get revenge. So Scott was killed. You’ll forgive me if I don’t shed a tear.”

“He was your beta, once.”

“He was a terrible beta. I never liked him. Any effort you want to make to appeal to my sense of sentimentality is useless and you know it. I didn’t care about your pack when they were alive, Stiles, and I certainly don’t care about them now that they’re dead.”

Stiles nodded and rubbed both hands over his face. “What do you want, then? What can I offer that would make you help me? I’ll give you anything.”

Peter quirked an eyebrow at him, amused by the melodrama even though he knew the offer was genuine. He couldn’t resist leaning a little closer. “Anything?” he asked.

Stiles looked up and met his eyes. A little shudder went through him, but his gaze held firm. “Anything,” he repeated.

After a moment, Peter leaned back in his chair and laughed. “No,” he said, “you’re making it too easy on me. At least make me put in some effort.”

Stiles took another swig from the whiskey bottle and said, “Then help me because you know how I feel. Help me because hunters murdered your family so you murdered them. Help me because I set you on fire once and that creates a special bond. Help me because you like to kill people and you’re bored in LA playing nice. Help me because _I don’t care_ , as long as you help me.”

Peter refilled his glass and put the cap back on the whiskey bottle, since it was clear that Stiles didn’t need any more. “What does your father think of your proposed revenge-based killing spree? He didn’t seem the type who would approve.”

“He doesn’t,” Stiles said. “He doesn’t approve or disapprove. He doesn’t anything.” Stiles picked up Peter’s glass of whiskey and downed it. “He was in his car, waiting to pick us up after we were done with the witches. Backing us up. His car got tossed. He didn’t take as much damage as we did, but then again, he isn’t a werewolf, either. So now he’s in the hospital. Persistent vegetative state, the doctors called it.”

“I was in one of those, once,” Peter said.

“I know. That’s what made me think of coming to you, actually.” Stiles’ tone was still flat and dull. He wasn’t crying. “If you won’t help me, at least give me the bite so I stand a fighting chance.”

“A fighting chance to what? Kill me and become an alpha so you’d be even more powerful?” Peter chuckled. “Nice try, but I don’t think so.”

Stiles shrugged listlessly.

“I could just kill you,” Peter said. “Put you out of your misery.”

“Is that what you wish someone had done to you, after the fire?” Stiles asked.

“No,” Peter said.

“Then don’t make stupid suggestions.” Stiles looked up, and for the first time since his arrival, he looked alive, not like a zombie. His eyes burned with hatred and rage and bottomless despair. “I’m going to kill them. I don’t know how I’m going to do it, but I am. And maybe I’ll wind up dead in the long run but I swear to God, I’m taking them with me.”

They sat in silence for a long minute while Peter looked at him, watched the way his fists slowly clenched and unclenched. Then he said, deliberately, “My pack needs an emissary.”

Stiles’ head bobbed mechanically. “Okay. If I survive, anyway.”

It was actually true, and it had been bothering Peter for a while. A pack without an emissary was vulnerable, because they didn’t have a magic-user. But since the actual purpose of an emissary was to bond with the alpha and help keep him connected to their humanity, it was next to impossible to find one that would fit the make-up of Peter’s rather odd pack. He had tried two, but despised both of them. Stiles would be adequate, he supposed.

“And I’m in charge,” Peter added. “I’ll make the plans, and you’ll take orders from me, no arguments.”

The ghost of a smile crossed Stiles’ face. “But I argued with Scott all the time. Derek, too. What makes you so special?”

Peter couldn’t help but be amused. “All right, no more arguing than you would have done with Scott.”

Stiles nodded again and rubbed both hands over his face.

“And if it gets too dangerous, I _will_ cut and run without a second thought,” Peter said. He figured Stiles already knew that, but it was a good idea to put it out there plainly. “This is your vendetta. Not mine.”

Stiles just nodded a third time, like his head was on a string.

“When was the last time you slept? Or ate, for that matter?”

“I dunno,” Stiles said. “Time’s all blended together. I must have eaten this morning. I think I had breakfast with Melissa before I left.”

“That’s another condition, then. I’m not your babysitter. You take care of yourself, and don’t bother me with trivial problems.”

“Okay.” Stiles stood. “Can I use your shower?”

“Sure. Towels in the linen closet next to the bathroom.”

Stiles had a backpack full of things with him, and he went into the bathroom without another word. Peter watched him go, and noticed that he had a pronounced limp, but didn’t say anything about it. He considered the baby-sitting aspect for a few minutes before he decided to order some food. He hadn’t eaten yet, and if he was going to get food, he might as well get enough for his new partner in crime. There was a good Indian place just down the block that delivered until midnight, and he was a frequent customer. If Stiles didn’t like Indian food, he could make do with peanut butter and jelly.

It was a little strange when Stiles got out of the shower, dressed in a loose T-shirt and flannel pajama pants, smelling like Peter’s soap and shampoo. The combination of scents was . . . interesting. Peter didn’t have people over at his own place very often, and certainly never people who used the shower.

Stiles saw the food and set to it without asking for permission. He went into the refrigerator and got a can of soda without asking for that, either. He ate in silence, methodical and hungry and almost _angry_ , and then he passed out on Peter’s sofa without saying another word. Peter saw the goosebumps on his arms and tossed a blanket over him.

Peter was a night owl, and always had been. Dinner at eleven PM was perfectly normal for him. He would stay up until three or four in the morning and then sleep until late. His job had flexible hours, so that wasn’t a problem. He took a few moments to text his pack to let them know he would be out of town for a few weeks. The pack would assume it was because of work. His job often took him out of town. Since he worked as a consultant, he didn’t have a boss to answer to. Nobody would care if he wasn’t in LA. If jobs came in, which they would over e-mail, he could just turn them down.

He liked the freedom of his consulting job. He had worked for some of the biggest and most prestigious law firms in the country – and for some of the dirtiest. When he felt like socializing and people asked what he did, he answered them honestly: he was a fixer. Some people asked, “oh, like that George Clooney movie?” to which he always replied, “Yes, except I kill more people than George Clooney.” Ninety-five percent of them laughed. The five percent that didn’t were the five percent that Peter would have actually been interested in socializing with, and they always gave him a wide berth after that.

He wondered what Stiles’ opinion of his profession would be. Likely he wouldn’t care. Peter could vividly remember the single-mindedness of the vendetta. How nothing else mattered. It had consumed him for years, and now it would consume Stiles. If he lived – which didn’t seem likely – he wouldn’t be the same. When it was over, he would be nothing more than a shell of the boy he had once been.

For a few minutes, he watched Stiles sleep and thought about how easy it would be to kill him and have done with it. It would be better for everyone, probably. The bright-eyed, snarky teenager that Peter remembered was dead. Stiles would be eaten alive by his rage and his pain, until there was nothing left. Even if he managed to pick up the scraps and make himself a life afterwards, the way Peter had, it wasn’t a life that anybody would envy. And there was his own skin to think about. Getting involved in this was stupid, even if he got an emissary out of it.

But he thought about what Stiles had said, whether he would have wanted someone to do that to him, and he wouldn’t have. Even if it would have been better in the long run for everyone. The people who had killed his family were dead, and he could sleep at night knowing that he had killed them. He had no regrets, and he knew how Stiles felt.

“You’re getting soft in your old age,” he said to himself, quietly. He reminded himself that he could – that he _would_ – ditch Stiles the moment things got too dangerous.

He cleaned up around his apartment, packed some things, set his e-mail to give out his standard ‘I’m out of the office but will respond whenever possible’ message as if he had an actual office. By then it was late, and he decided to get some sleep.

The next morning, he wasn’t surprised to see that Stiles was still asleep on the sofa. He obviously hadn’t slept in a long time, and having found an ally had probably taken enough of the weight off his chest that he had relaxed. Peter thought about letting him sleep, but decided against it. He would rather get this over with. So he started the coffee maker – the espresso maker, to be precise – and then went over and shook Stiles by one shoulder.

Stiles flailed and assumed a defensive position, lashing out at Peter. The werewolf fended off his attacks easily and waited for him to come around. Stiles shook his head like a dog shaking off water, and blinked at Peter as lucidity crept back into his eyes. “Oh,” he said, but he didn’t apologize. “What time is it?”

“About ten,” Peter said. “We’re leaving.”

“Got any coffee?” Stiles asked, rolling off the sofa.

“Brewing as we speak,” Peter said. Stiles nodded and headed into the bathroom. Peter watched him go. He came out a minute later, fully dressed. His hair had been brushed back, out of his face, so it wouldn’t be in his way. Peter inwardly marveled at the soul’s ability to cope with adversity, to focus and get things done when something important was on the line. The Stiles of this morning seemed like a completely different person from the Stiles of the night before. Gone was the hopeless, desperate boy that had knocked on his door. In his place was the man focused on revenge, who would go to whatever lengths necessary to accomplish his goals. Peter approved. He could see now that it wasn’t just the death of his pack that had changed him. The years of being the emissary to the True Alpha had made Stiles grow up and come into his own.

He made himself a double-shot latte. Stiles drank what was left of the espresso straight up, and Peter couldn’t help but grimace. “That hasn’t changed, I see,” he said. “You were a coffee freak then and you’re a coffee freak now.”

“I tried speed for a while, but it wasn’t the same,” Stiles said, and Peter couldn’t help but wonder if he was serious.

“Where’s your car?” he asked instead.

“In a dump in Beacon Hills,” Stiles said. “The Jeep got totaled along with everything else in a five hundred yard vicinity. I took the bus here.”

“We’ll take my car, then,” Peter said. He locked up the apartment and headed down to the complex’s garage. Stiles seemed unimpressed by the little Honda he drove. “Sometimes it pays to be inconspicuous,” Peter told him, loading his bags into the trunk. “I don’t need a huge truck or a zippy sports car to compensate for a tiny dick.”

“Thanks for sharing that,” Stiles said, getting into the passenger seat.

“Would you like me to share my dick with you?” Peter smirked at him. “You did grow up nicely.”

“Maybe later,” Stiles replied, and Peter pouted slightly at the lack of reaction.

He backed out of the parking space and got the car on the road. While they were waiting at the stoplight outside his apartment complex, he shuffled through his CDs and put some in the stereo. His taste in music was somewhat eclectic, but he doubted that Stiles would complain. Neither of them spoke again until he was on the highway, heading north. Then Peter said, “What can you tell me about these witches?”

“Not much.” Stiles fiddled with the hem of his shirt. “We didn’t have a lot of dealings with them, really. They started with a coup de main, as you would put it.”

“A pre-emptive strike,” Peter said, nodding in approval.

“Basically,” Stiles said, “Scott had started making any supernatural force that wanted to come to Beacon Hills get his permission first. The witch contacted him, saying that the coven was fleeing from a nasty break-up with their local pack. Scott agreed to meet with them and discuss terms of them setting up shop in Beacon Hills. We met them at the high school and they had rigged the whole place with explosives. There was enough wolfsbane and silver in them to kill even an alpha.” Stiles relayed this in the same flat tone he had used to talk about Scott’s death the previous night. “Scott realized what was about to happen with just enough time to shove me out of the room. The rest of the pack were on perimeter. They never even saw it coming.”

“So you hardly know anything about them,” Peter said.

“Nope,” Stiles agreed.

“If they’ve killed people since coming to town, we could maybe get some information on them that way,” Peter mused. “Do you still have access to the police station, now that your father is no longer sheriff?”

“Yeah,” Stiles said. “There are enough people there that are in-the-know that they’ll let me have what I want.”

“Good. That gives us a place to start, at least.”

Stiles glanced over at him. “How did you do it? Find out who was responsible for what happened to your family?”

Peter shrugged. “That arson investigator knew everything. He told me, with a little . . . persuasion.”

Stiles nodded a little.

“What’s with the limp?”

“My leg was broken in three places. They pinned it back together and told me it would be a miracle if I ever walked again. But I was extremely motivated in my physical therapy.”

“I’m sure,” Peter said.

“In the movies, you know, people get tossed by explosions and then get up and walk away,” Stiles said. “Nobody realizes that air can have force. That the force exuded by an explosion of any magnitude can liquefy your insides. Not to even mention the impact of when I hit the far wall. The Nemeton kept me alive, but it didn’t actually heal me. I had to do that at the normal pace.”

“You should probably have a crutch or something.”

“I do, but I left it in Beacon Hills. I didn’t want you to see it.”

“Afraid I’d take it as a sign of weakness?”

“Wouldn’t you?”

Peter shrugged. “I spent almost six years in a catatonic fugue in the hospital before I managed to get my shit together well enough to start with my vendetta. Six months and a crutch is barely worth mentioning.”

“Gee, that’s almost touching.”

They drove in silence for almost an hour before Peter said, “Do you have any allies in Beacon Hills?”

“Not anymore,” Stiles replied. “I tried to get in touch with a few people when I first got out of the hospital. Nobody wants to get involved. Even those that survived the witches’ purge of Beacon Hills aren’t willing to help now. They’re too scared. It’s just you and me. I don’t even know where we’re going to stay. My identity as the emissary was well-known, so we don’t dare go back to my place. I haven’t been back since it happened. It could be booby-trapped.”

“Do the witches know you survived?”

Stiles just gave a shrug. “I don’t know if they stopped to count the bodies or not. They haven’t come after me.”

“Where did you stay after you left the hospital?”

“At Melissa’s, but I’m sure as hell not bringing you there.”

“Fair enough,” Peter says. “I still have a key to Derek’s loft.”

“So do I, but that’s the first place they would look for me if they figure out I’m still alive and/or back in town.”

“Aren’t you a Debbie Downer,” Peter said, amused despite himself. “Well, I’m not sleeping in my car, and despite the fact that common sense would advise against it, it’s better if we stick together. I’ll find us a place once we get back. How much investigation was done into the explosion?”

“I’m not sure. I was seven eighths dead. But I imagine a lot. I mean, they blew up the fucking high school.”

“About time someone did that,” Peter commented. “Wolfsbane, silver, wired into explosives – that’s got a hunter twist to it. Did you talk to any of the Argents?”

Stiles rubbed a hand over his face. “Chris Argent died while I was in the hospital. Probably trying to get revenge for his daughter, or kill the witches for the sake of the town, or whatever Code bullshit he lived by. And I don’t know about you, but I don’t keep a lot of hunters on speed dial. There’s nobody left I can ask.”

“We’ll have to see what the police dug up, then,” Peter said. “And we’re going to swing by your place. Carefully. If there’s any sort of spell or booby trap, that might give us more information.”

“All right,” Stiles said tonelessly. “If you think it’s worth the risk.”

The rest of the drive passed without much chatter. Peter occasionally tried to initiate conversation about something non-vendetta related, but it never went anywhere. He did it more to assess Stiles’ mental state than because he was actually interested in hearing about what was going on in Beacon Hills or Stiles’ life. But as expected, Stiles was completely focused on revenge. He didn’t have an ounce of mental fortitude to spare for anything else. He never asked Peter a single question about his life, his pack, his work. It was as if Peter’s only purpose on the planet was to assist Stiles in his revenge.

And to be honest, Peter was fine with that.

They stopped at the McCall house long enough for Stiles to assure Melissa that he was okay, and to get some things that he had apparently left at her house, including his crutch. Peter watched as they came out onto the front porch. Stiles gave Melissa a long embrace before heading back to the car. His gait was more sure and steady, if not faster, with the crutch. It was a forearm crutch rather than a full crutch, and he leaned on it heavily and took short steps. He was also carrying an aluminum baseball bat, which he tossed into the backseat of the car.

After that, they headed for the police station. Peter dropped Stiles off there and went to see about accommodations. There was an extended-stay hotel on the far side of town, which had suites available with kitchenettes, so he got one of those and paid for two weeks in advance. The lobby was closed and he checked in through the night window, even though the sun had barely set half an hour before. The clerk looked nervous. Her hands shook as she accepted his credit card. Peter could see what Stiles had meant about Beacon Hills being different.

He took their bags up to the room and gave it a brief onceover before going to pick Stiles up. He had two cardboard boxes full of files. “Luddites,” Peter remarked, looking at the boxes.

“A lot of it is computerized, but I don’t have access to their computer network, so they had to print it out for me,” Stiles said, lugging the boxes towards the car.

“Fair enough,” Peter said. “Are you hungry?”

“I guess,” Stiles replied, so Peter headed to the grocery store. They passed several boarded up businesses and shops that looked like they had closed early for the night.

“Just as cheery as ever,” Peter remarked. “Good old Beacon Hills.”

“People have already started leaving,” Stiles said, staring out the window. “It’s like . . . the town is going bad. Rotten. Can you smell it?”

Peter nodded. It was a scent that he couldn’t put into words, but he smelled it all the same. He pulled into the parking lot for the grocery store, and they went inside. He bought sandwich material, bread and cheese and lunch meat. A bag of oranges. He wasn’t much of a cook, and didn’t want to get anything that would need a lot of preparation. Stiles added a twelve-pack of Mountain Dew to the cart, and then a six-pack of beer.

“You know, I have to admit I’m somewhat jealous that you can get drunk,” Peter said. “It would have been nice to have that option once in a while.”

“It doesn’t help as much as you would think,” Stiles said. “You only feel more crappy the next morning. Does the hotel have a microwave?” he asked, and Peter nodded, so Stiles threw in some frozen potatoes and chicken fingers so they would have a little variety in their diet. “You want anything sweet?” he asked, and then threw a pack of ice cream sandwiches in the cart without waiting for a response.

“My, this is domestic,” Peter said, as they got in line with their cart.

“We could have gone to a Jack-in-the-Box; you’re the one who picked a grocery store.”

“Good point,” Peter said. They took the groceries back to the hotel room. It was about eight PM now, and the streets were deserted. “I feel like I’m in Sunnydale.”

Stiles’ head snapped around. “You. Watch. Buffy.”

Peter arched an eyebrow at him. “Is that a problem?”

“It depends. Who’s your favorite character?”

“Spike. Who else?”

Stiles nodded a little. “That’s okay then.”

Peter couldn’t help but be amused. “Who’s yours?”

There was a pause. “Xander.”

“Of course,” Peter said. “The one without any special powers. The regular guy who tagged along. Shouldn’t it be Willow, though? You did have magic, in the end.”

“You know as well as I do that a Druid’s magic is defensive, get-in-touch-with-nature type of stuff. I won’t be shooting lightning bolts at anyone any time soon.”

“More’s the pity.” Peter pulled to a stop at their hotel, and the two of them went upstairs. Minutes later, Stiles was immersed in the information he had gathered at the police station. He started putting things up on the walls: pictures and maps and data charts. Some of them, he connected with red or black strings.

Peter made himself a sandwich and watched for a while, but got bored quickly. This wasn’t his strong suit. He could put together the trail if he wanted, he supposed, but Stiles was in his element, and he would only be in the way. That wasn’t why he was here. After a while, he took out his laptop and started doing some of his own work, keeping half an eye on Stiles while he did it.

“Okay,” Stiles finally said. “I’ve got half a dozen likelies. Women who have moved to the area within the past year, bought property or whatever.”

“You shouldn’t discount men,” Peter cautioned. “The term ‘witch’ is feminine but covens often have both genders.”

Stiles nodded a little and said, “Yeah, but the three we met at the high school that night were all women, and so far every eyewitness account of one of the murders that have taken place since have indicated a woman. That means it’s likely an all-female coven, or at the least primarily female. And if I can find one of them, I can find the rest.”

“Fair enough,” Peter said. “I presume you have more to go on than ‘new to the area’.”

“Believe it or not, that in and of itself is suspicious,” Stiles said. “The real estate market in Beacon Hills has tanked since the high school blew up.” He pushed both hands through his hair. “But yes, a couple of them have been suspects in some of the other murders, seen at the scenes of the crime, purchased stuff at the local occult shop, et cetera, et cetera. If you’d like me to go over my cross-referencing, I can.”

“That won’t be necessary.” Peter smiled at him. “I like seeing you like this. In the zone, as it were.”

Stiles narrowed his eyes in a confused expression, then waved a hand and said, “Whatever, dude. I don’t want to go by my place until the sun’s up, so, I guess that’s it for the day.”

Peter shook his head. “There’s one more thing. Has the high school been rebuilt?”

“No,” Stiles said. “The site was deemed unfit for reconstruction. They’re bussing the students to another high school while they build another one on the north side of town. It’s been bulldozed and they put up a memorial there. You know, since a bunch of people died in the explosion. Fortunately nobody’s thought to ask what the fuck we were doing there.”

“What was the official explanation for the explosion?” Peter asked, then added without waiting, “Gas leak?”

“What else?” Stiles said with a sigh. “Anyway, what does it matter? There’s nothing left there.”

“Good. Because there’s something we need to put there.” Peter stood and headed for the door. Stiles was obviously puzzled, but followed him without question. He had to give Peter directions; it had been a long time since he had been to Beacon Hills High. As promised, it was now an empty field with a single tree in the middle. “Tasteful,” Peter said, reading the plaque.

Stiles shrugged. “I didn’t put it together. I don’t even know who did.”

Peter glanced around. The field seemed completely empty, although he knew that some witches could hide their presence. “Draw the spiral,” he said.

Stiles looked at him. “Why?”

“Because that’s the way this is done,” Peter replied.

“All it will do is tell the witches that someone survived, that someone is after them.”

“That will happen as soon as you kill the first one anyway,” Peter said, and shook his head. “Stiles. This is how it’s done. The symbol is important. You’re a Druid – you know that words and symbols have power. This is a declaration of a vendetta, it’s a promise that you won’t give up no matter what happens. That will give you power.”

Stiles let out a shuddering breath. Then he nodded. He walked to the edge of the tree and planted his crutch in the soft dirt. He started walking in a spiral around the tree, dragging the crutch in the dirt to make the mark in the ground. He walked around the tree four times total. The spiral took on an eerie white glow for a brief moment, then faded.

“That’s enough,” Peter said. “There’s no turning back now.”

“There was never any turning back,” Stiles said, and headed back to the car.

 

~ ~ ~ ~


	2. Chapter 2

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Please forgive my misuse of Polish and possible lack of understanding about how it's best to dispose of evidence after a murder. Some things, you just can't Google.

 

“The good thing about witches,” Peter said the next day, over a stack of waffles, “is that underneath all the magic, they’re human. They’re nowhere near as tough as werewolves or any other supernatural nasty. Get around their defenses, and all you need is one good headshot to take them out.”

Stiles cut his eggs into tiny pieces with his fork, but he was clearly listening closely. “The defenses are the problem.”

“One thing at a time. How good are you in a fight?”

“I could hold my own with your average beta for a few minutes, long enough for someone to come to my rescue,” Stiles said. He picked up the syrup bottle decisively and started to drown his pancakes. The waitress at the diner had known him, and there was an entire pot of coffee on their table.

“Which means you’re more than a match for your average witch. What do you have in the way of weapons?”

“The aluminum bat is what I use for close combat,” Stiles said, “which I tend to avoid if possible. Cora tried to teach me knife-fighting but I was never very good at it.”

“Any guns?”

“I have a 9 mm that my dad got me a couple years ago,” Stiles said, “and a pump-action shotgun.”

“Legal?”

“The Beretta, yes. It’s licensed and everything. The shotgun, not even close.”

Peter pondered all of this for a few minutes while he dumped creamer into his coffee and devoured a piece of bacon. It was a good diner. He wasn’t about to complain. “How much of a problem is the local law going to be?”

“That depends on how you define ‘problem’,” Stiles said, and Peter made an irritated, ‘get on with it’ gesture. “Are they going to investigate? Yeah. These women, the three I’ve narrowed it down to so far, they’re a banker, a teacher, and a hotel clerk. They aren’t women who can just disappear. If they’re found dead or missing, the police will investigate, thoroughly. Even when my dad was the sheriff, we had to be very careful about that sort of thing, because there was only so much he could sweep underneath the rug for us.”

Peter nodded. “The guns would be a bad idea, then. The less evidence, the better.”

“Yeah,” Stiles agreed. “Maybe I can beat them to death with my crutch.”

“Well, that would be karma in action,” Peter said, “but let’s hold off on that. We’ll go by your apartment once we’ve eaten.”

It was ‘breakfast’ only in that it was their first meal of the day. They had both been up late, and Stiles’ sleep had been restless. He had gotten up around dawn, started making phone calls and doing things on his computer, adding more information to his evidence wall, and then flopped back down on the bed and passed out abruptly around nine AM. This had annoyed Peter profoundly, as it had messed with his own sleep cycle. But he knew that Stiles would be more fit if he got his rest, so he had allowed the teenager to sleep until about one PM. That was quite enough. The more they could get done before dark, the better. It was September, so the sun didn’t set until around six thirty, but the days were only going to get shorter.

As they left the diner, he found himself intensely curious about Stiles’ living space. He simply doesn’t know what to expect. He wouldn’t be surprised if Stiles still lived with his father, or if he had an apartment, a mansion, or a cardboard box. “Do you even have a job?” he asked, as Stiles got in behind the passenger seat.

“Not anymore,” Stiles said.

Peter was somewhat surprised he hadn’t asked to drive, since he was the one who knew where he was going. Then he realized that it was probably difficult for him, perhaps even dangerous, given the injuries to his leg. “Where to?”

Stiles directed him to a disappointingly mundane apartment complex on the south side of town. There were about twenty buildings, Peter judged, each one two stories, shaped like an L, and containing four apartments. Unfortunately, Stiles lived on the second floor, and he eyed the stairs like they were going to eat him before he started climbing up. His apartment was the short side of the L. That made the apartment small, so Peter guessed he had lived alone. “Never got together with Lydia, hm?” he asked, as Stiles hobbled up the steps.

“Don’t talk about Lydia,” Stiles said flatly. “Don’t talk about any of them. Not unless you have to.”

Peter raised his hands in surrender, suppressing a rather toothy smile. “I don’t hear anyone inside, but you’re the Druid. Is it safe to enter?”

Stiles spread his hand out against the door and closed his eyes. Peter watched him in interest. Werewolves couldn’t smell Druids, the way they could smell another werewolf, but there was something about them – a peculiar _stillness_ to them when they were in the middle of a working. It was especially noticeable on Stiles, who was normally so fidgety and active. “I don’t sense any magic, and my wards are still intact,” he finally said.

“Wards, hm?” Peter asked.

Stiles nodded and took a keyring out of his pocket. It had a _lot_ of keys on it, Peter noticed, but he didn’t bother asking. It was common for a pack to have keys to each other’s residences, and he was willing to bet that some of those keys were for the police station, whether Stiles was supposed to have them or not. He opened the door, peered inside cautiously, and then went in.

Peter was going to follow, but then remembered the wards. He stretched a hand out, moving it over the threshold. His skin started to tingle. “What would they do if I came in?” he asked.

“It’s a standard entry spell,” Stiles said. “Anyone can come and go, but they leave their power at the door.”

“I’ll stay out here, then, if you don’t mind.”

Stiles shook his head slightly and said, “Come inside.”

The words had weight to them, power, and Peter could sense the spell parting like a curtain to admit him. He stepped into the apartment and looked around. It was messy without being dirty, small without being cramped. A good starter apartment for a guy in his twenties. The far wall was entirely the entertainment system, and there was a small sofa across from it. The wall closest had a desk and a laptop docking station. The kitchen was to his right, and he could see a narrow hallway that presumably led to the bedroom and bathroom. The walls were a plain, slate blue, and there were some posters tacked up. Only one was framed, a vintage Star Wars poster.

Everything was coated in a fine layer of dust, and Peter stopped just inside to assess the situation. He sniffed carefully, but didn’t smell any threats. No wolfsbane, no silver, and no one else’s presence. The apartment smelled like Stiles, and very faintly, like Lydia and Scott. If there was a booby trap set, he didn’t see it. “It doesn’t seem like anyone’s been here in a while,” he said.

Stiles nodded agreement. But they wanted to be thorough. They went through every room, looking for trip wires, loaded crossbows, anything that could be harmful. “Now, you’re certain no magic was done?” Peter asked.

“Nobody could have done any magic in here without ripping the wards to shreds,” Stiles said. He pushed both hands through his hair, leaving lopsided spikes behind. “If they set a trap, it was mundane. So I guess they didn’t.”

Peter nodded slowly. “They either don’t know you survived, or they don’t care. And if they don’t know, it’s because they don’t care. It would have been easy enough to find out. I looked through the newspapers from the time of the explosion. It was quite clear that there had been two survivors, the sheriff and his son. So odds are good that they simply don’t see you as a threat.”

“Thanks,” Stiles said.

“It’s a good thing,” Peter said. “It means they’re arrogant. That’s a weakness we can exploit.” He turned to Stiles and continued, “Everything we learn about our enemy gives us an advantage. We know their strengths. They’re cunning, and ruthless. They’re smart enough to use something mundane like an explosive, when the situation calls for it. It’s high time we found a weakness we can use.”

“Yes, teacher,” Stiles said.

“By the way,” Peter said, “I saw your name in the paper. How on earth is that pronounced?”

Stiles glanced over at him. Slowly, he drags the word out over his tongue. It sounds something like ‘Shem-iss-vahf’ although that’s certainly not what Peter would have guessed from the spelling, which was Przemysław.

Peter repeated it carefully. “When was the last time someone called you by your real name?”

“Probably at least twenty years ago. You can forget it, now that you’ve heard it. If you say it again, I’ll rip out your tongue and choke you with it. My mother gave me that name, and I don’t want to hear it from you.”

“Touchy, touchy,” Peter said. “Shall we pay a visit to some of your likely suspects?”

“Sure.” Stiles let them out of the apartment, closed the door, and locked it. “Just in case it comes up,” he said, “the parting of the wards is a one-time thing. I would have to invite you in every time, or give you a permanent key, like Scott and the others had. Basically, if you have to come here without me for any reason, be prepared that the wards will grab a bunch of your power on the way in.”

“Noted,” Peter said, making a mental note that he would avoid it if at all possible.

Stiles had narrowed down his list of suspects to the three most likely. Peter didn’t ask how. He didn’t care about Stiles’ methods, and if they killed an innocent or two, well, that wouldn’t be the worst thing Peter had ever done. All three of them were unmarried, with no children. Two lived in houses and the third lived in an apartment.

“Let’s leave her for last,” Peter said. “Apartment complexes have security, door codes, cameras. Better to avoid that if at all possible.”

Stiles agreed, so they headed for the house that was closer. It was a small one-story that actually wasn’t too far away. “They might have put up their own wards,” he said, as Peter was pulling up down the block. It was about three PM, and the street was empty.

“Not if they’re as arrogant as we suspect they might be,” Peter said, “but wards being up will tell us something, even if we can’t get into the house. And if we can, we’ll see what we can find.”

“Okay,” Stiles said. He led the way, hobbling along at a rapid pace. He still seemed to know every in and out of Beacon Hills. They cut off the street, went through a couple backyards, and came out in the house’s backyard. Peter was quiet for a moment, listening. Nobody was inside. Stiles rested his hands against the back door. Again, that preternatural stillness took over. Then he said, “No wards.”

The door was locked, so he pulled on a pair of latex gloves and a set of tools from the pocket of his cargo pants. Peter watched appreciatively as he jimmied the lock open and let them inside. They spent a good half hour searching it for any sign that the woman who lived there might be part of a witch’s coven, but found nothing.

“We could ask her,” Peter said.

Stiles shook his head. “If we run out of other leads, maybe. But not until then.”

Peter thought about reminding him that he was in charge, but decided against it. There would be no use in trying to push Stiles’ moral compass further than it would go. They closed the door behind them and headed for the second house. It was larger, and further away, almost outside the town limits. The houses were far enough away that Peter felt comfortable just walking up the front door. “She has a cat,” he said, gesturing to the little cat flap in the door. “That’s a good sign.”

“That’s a stereotype,” Stiles replied absently, running his hands along the door. “Still no wards, but . . . I think a witch lives here. I can feel the same . . . darkness here. That I feel in the town.”

Peter nodded wordlessly. Stiles was right. There was that same rotten smell, a pervasive stench that couldn’t be described in words. He watched Stiles pull on the rubber gloves and pull out his little set of lock picks. “I’m really enjoying watching you work,” he said, smirking.

“Yeah, well, you can stop hitting on me any time now,” Stiles said. “It’s demeaning.”

“Why?” Peter asked, leaning his shoulder against the house while he waited.

“Because you’re mocking me and trying to make me feel small by being a cocktease, and I don’t appreciate it.”

“Hardly,” Peter said. “It would only qualify as teasing if I would refuse to follow through. Which I wouldn’t.”

Stiles barely glanced up. “Am I supposed to take that as a compliment? You would probably fuck anything with two legs and a nice ass.”

“True,” Peter said, and admired the way Stiles was leaning over. “But yours _is_ a particularly nice one.”

Stiles said nothing.

“Why is it, do you think, that there aren’t any wards?” Peter asked.

“It probably has to do with the difference in the kind of magic that a Druid can do, versus that of a witch,” Stiles said. “Wards are a sustained spell. They have power, a life of their own, even if left unattended for, well, months. Witches generally can’t do that sort of spell. They can’t breathe life into a spell and let it run itself.”

“That’s very poetic,” Peter mused.

Stiles glanced at him and then continued working on the lock. “Dark magic is powerful. But it has limits. It’s almost always destructive. An average witch could blow a building to bits a lot easier than they could ward it.” There was a little ‘chunk’ noise from the lock. “Ah, got it,” Stiles said, and pushed the door open to let them inside.

The interior of the house was nice, spacious and beautifully decorated. Peter saw several pricey items, original paintings and a gorgeous vase. Stiles ignored all of that, prowling around for evidence that this woman was one of the witches that had killed his pack. It was easy enough to find. The basement had a room that was filled with arcane artifacts. There were symbols drawn on the wall, black candles in a candelabra on what looked like a sacrificial altar. A cabinet was filled with vials of dark red blood and other unsavory looking liquids.

Stiles looked at Peter and said, “What now?”

“We need to take her alive,” Peter said calmly. “She can give us the identities of the rest of the coven.” He waited to see if Stiles would balk at the idea of torture. He didn’t; instead, he just gave a little nod. So Peter continued, “This woman was the banker, right? So she’ll get off work at five. This house is about a twenty minute drive. Assuming she comes straight home, she’ll be here by five thirty. That’s only about an hour away. We can wait for her here, and ambush her.”

There was a moment while Stiles fidgeted. “What’s going to stop her from handing our asses to us?”

“Think about this,” Peter said. “The coven used mundane explosives with a few special additives to take down your pack. That means that they aren’t hugely powerful. They most likely came here because of the Nemeton, the ley lines. They knew they could get a lot of power here. Individually, they won’t be as powerful as all of them put together. Which means that I can handle her.”

“They’ve probably gotten a lot more powerful since they got here,” Stiles pointed out. “That was months ago, and they’ve almost definitely been making sacrifices.”

“True. And I certainly wouldn’t want to take on an entire group of them. But I think we can handle one.”

Stiles nodded and went to lock the front door that they had come in through, so the woman wouldn’t realize anyone was there. “Where are we going to take her after we have her?”

“The loft,” Peter said. He saw Stiles about to protest and said, “I wouldn’t want to stay there long-term, but it’s ideal for this purpose. Nobody is close by, and it’s well-insulated.”

“Fine,” Stiles said.

They didn’t talk much, while they were waiting. Stiles was still so ultra-focused on what was happening that he didn’t respond to any of Peter’s conversational gambits. After a few tries, Peter gave up. He was used to silence. He got out his phone and started surfing the ‘net to keep himself occupied.

The witch was punctual. They heard her key in the lock at five twenty-eight. Stiles stood back, because Peter had made it clear that he would handle this and Stiles should only intervene if it looked like things weren’t going well. He was in the kitchen, out of sight. Peter stood where he would be hidden by the door as it swung open, partially shifted. He didn’t want to have to go into the full alpha form if it wasn’t necessary. It was too big for the close quarters.

Taking her alive was harder than it sounded, though. Peter knew his own strength could easily kill a human without even trying. He decided it would be safer to choke her out than try to knock her out with a blow to the head. As soon as the door swung shut behind her, he grabbed her. Pressure to the carotid artery would knock her out a lot faster than a simple chokehold. It took about ten to fifteen seconds, if he recalled correctly.

He had no sooner grabbed her – he had no sooner _touched_ her – than all the glass in the front windows exploded. She made a noise like a hiss, a noise that didn’t sound like it could have come from a human throat. Then a chair flew at their heads. She obviously expected Peter to let go and dodge, but instead he twisted to one side, still holding her. She flailed and struggled, feet kicking at the ground. The glass from the windows rose in a cloud and flew towards them.

Peter was forced to let go at that, pushing her away from him and diving to the ground before the glass could fill him with holes. The witch screamed in triumph as the glass parted around her and smashed on the floor. Peter leapt for her again, and suddenly the air between them felt thick and slow. He struggled against it, but it was like swimming in molasses. Worse than that, it was _hot_. He could feel it scorching his lungs as he fought to get free.

“You made a mistake coming here, whoever you are,” the witch hissed. “I think I’m going to read your purpose in your entrails – ”

Peter was contemplating that they might have made a slight miscalculation in their assessment of how powerful these witches were, when Stiles’ aluminum baseball bat caught the witch in the small of her back. She let out a slight cry and stumbled forward, doubling over. The bat came up and around and slammed down on the nape of her neck with a sickening crunch. She hit the ground with a thud.

The air around Peter abruptly went cool and loose, and he took in a few quick breaths to steady himself out. Then he looked down at the witch and grimaced, nudging her with his toe. She twitched and moaned faintly. “No good,” he said. The blow Stiles had struck her was a killing one, or at the very least, would result in severe brain damage. “She won’t be telling us anything. Finish her off.”

Stiles blinked at him for a moment, as if he didn’t quite contemplate what Peter was saying. Then he looked down. Looked at the blood on his baseball bat. Peter waited patiently while his numbed mind worked through it. She would be dead in a few minutes or hours, depending on exactly where the damage was. But when there were witches involved – or anything supernatural – you never left things to chance. You never walked away while a body was still breathing.

The witch had crumpled on her side. Stiles lifted the bat and brought it down again on the side of her head, right on her temple. There was another noise that was like a crack. She twitched but didn’t make a noise. Stiles brought the bat down again. And then again.

She was quite dead – anyone could see that, and Peter knew it because he could no longer hear her heartbeat. But he decided if Stiles wanted to beat her corpse into a bloody mess, that was his own business. He had some other things to attend to. He left Stiles there, making a quick circuit around the house and grabbing anything that looked valuable. He found a laundry basket and piled in the woman’s jewelry, some of the electronics, the paintings, even the shoes. Anything that looked like it could fetch a price. He went back downstairs. Stiles was still methodically beating the witch’s body into pulp, so Peter brought the basket out to the car.

When he got back inside, Stiles was leaning against the wall, breathing heavily like he had just run a marathon. Peter looked at him and said, “All right?”

Stiles nodded. Without being told, he dipped his finger in the woman’s blood and drew a spiral on the wall. Peter was glad to see that he was still wearing the rubber gloves he had used to break into the house in the first place.

Peter took the woman’s wallet and her cell phone. Then he wet down one of the kitchen towels and gave it to Stiles to clean himself up. There was blood all over his face and his shirt. Peter sighed. At least they weren’t planning on going anywhere after this. Stiles scrubbed his face off. “Lock the front door,” Peter told him. Stiles did so without question, and Peter forced it open from the outside. A burglary gone wrong wasn’t the most original way of handling an unexpected death, but it would do.

They needed to get rid of the things they had taken. Peter ran through Beacon Hills geography in his head before deciding there wasn’t anywhere appropriate. By the time Stiles was in the passenger seat of the car, he had decided where to go. Stiles sat in unquestioning silence while Peter started driving. He didn’t say a word even when Peter left Beacon Hills, but just stared out the window. There was a smear of blood underneath his eye that he had missed while cleaning himself up.

Peter put on a Rolling Stones CD and drove until they reached a lake in a small town nearby. The sun was setting and there was a chill in the air, so the lake was deserted. Peter found a few stones towards the edge of the water. He wrapped everything up in trash bags taken from the witch’s house, weighted it down with the rocks, and then threw it as hard as he could. It landed about five hundred yards out and began to sink.

That done, he got back in the car. Stiles hadn’t moved, and showed no interest in what he was doing. But as they drove, he spoke again, his voice quiet. “When does it start helping?”

Peter glanced at him. “Towards the end,” he said, keeping his tone matter-of-fact. “You’re just scratching the surface of it now. Facing the reality of the task ahead, which apparently is going to be somewhat more difficult than anticipated. But near the end . . . once most of them are dead . . . you’ll start to feel some of the weight lift off your chest.”

“Okay.” Stiles closed his eyes and leaned his head against the window.

They drove back to Beacon Hills in silence except for the music. Stiles might as well have been a corpse himself, as he sat with his eyes closed, awake but unmoving. Peter went through a drive-thru and got them both some food. Stiles ate mechanically, without interest, and only ate about half of what he was given.

“We’re going to have to go after the one who lived in an apartment,” Peter finally said. “Since we weren’t able to take this one alive. She was powerful. Much more than I would have expected. How much information can we get about the people who have been killed recently?”

“I have it all back at the hotel,” Stiles said, and glanced over at him, coming alive again by degrees. “Five-fold knot?”

“Maybe,” Peter said, “but there are other ways to gain power. Or we could have just been unlucky. She could have been one of the highest ranking witches in the coven. Either way, it won’t be long before they realize she’s been killed. Presumably, her work will report her missing when she doesn’t arrive tomorrow. Other than that, we don’t know enough about the coven. They might see each other regularly, but it can’t be too often. These are women with careers. Some of them could have families. They aren’t out riding broomsticks all night, every night. But they might keep in contact by phone or text. It’s impossible to say when they’ll realize she was killed.”

“Wouldn’t they know . . . magically?” Stiles asked.

“A coven isn’t a werewolf pack,” Peter said. “They aren’t bound the same way. So no. But the sooner we go after the next one, the better.”

Stiles pushed both hands through his hair. “I’m not thrilled with the idea of doing it after dark,” he said, “and the woman who lived in the apartment building was a hotel clerk who worked nights. She’s probably already left for work and won’t be home until dawn.”

“Tomorrow afternoon, then,” Peter said. “In the meantime, let’s see what we can find out about the people who have been killed. If we can find out what kind of sacrifices they’ve been making, we’ll know more about what they’re capable of.”

 

~ ~ ~ ~


	3. Chapter 3

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Man, this chapter really hits a lot of points on the emotional spectrum....

 

When they got back to the hotel, Peter expected Stiles to go straight into his research. Instead, he changed into his pajamas and started doing a routine of stretches and weight-bearing exercises. He had done it the previous night as well, but Peter had chalked it up to the long car ride. Now he watched in more interest. “Physical therapy?” he asked, and Stiles just nodded in response.

After that was done, he pulled out the files on the people who had been killed since the coven’s arrival in Beacon Hills. This time, Peter was more of a participant than an observer. He knew plenty about magic, although Stiles knew some things he didn’t. They compiled similarities between the victims, between the crime scenes, between the circumstances.

Nothing popped out, but they did find some patterns. The vast majority of the victims were women, and ranged in age from nineteen to forty-three. Although some children had disappeared, no bodies had been found. The women were all killed at night, and none of their bodies had been found at home, but rather dumped in parks or on the street. Stiles pinned each death on the map he has of Beacon Hills and said that the bodies weren’t being found along the ley lines, but since they had clearly been moved after their deaths, that probably didn’t mean anything. Uniformly, it was a three-fold death, the most popular method of killing a sacrifice. Stiles typed up a long e-mail to send to Dr. Deaton, saying that he might be able to help shed some light on things. “I doubt it,” Peter replied, remembering how cryptic the veterinarian had a tendency to be.

“He might help,” Stiles said. “I mean, he loved Scott like a son, so . . .”

Peter watched as Stiles rubbed both hands over his face. “What about Derek? Does he know what happened?”

Stiles shook his head. “I don’t have any way of getting in touch with him,” he said. “You know, he and Cora were off living in the rainforests of Brazil, they barely have satellite phone service. He called to check in occasionally, but . . . at first it was like every other week, but now it’s more like every six months. And knowing him, if he doesn’t get Scott on the first try, he’ll just think ‘oh well, I’ll talk to them next time I’m in Rio’ and then wander back into solitude.”

“Most likely,” Peter agreed. It sounded like his nephew. He hadn’t talked to Derek or Cora in over three years. He watched as Stiles sprawled out on the bed, his face creased as he slowly rubbed a hand down over his leg. “Does it hurt?”

“Yeah,” Stiles said.

“Maybe it’s going to rain,” Peter said.

Stiles gave him a disgusted look. “I’m not a fucking barometer. It hurts all the God damned time. I just usually . . . there just isn’t usually anyone around to see it.” His hand clenched into a fist and he pressed it down against his thigh. “I’m going to get some sleep.”

“Will it bother you if I leave the desk light on?” Peter asked, taking out his laptop.

“Would you care if it did?”

Peter glanced over. “We’re stuck together for the duration, so some basic courtesy wouldn’t go amiss, don’t you think?”

Stiles looked away. “Nah, I don’t care. I can sleep through just about anything.”

“All right, then.” Peter opened his laptop and pulled up his email. He was peripherally aware of Stiles getting underneath the blankets and turning out the other lights. It left the hotel room dim, but not so dark that working was difficult. He exchanged some emails with some people he worked with and read the news.

Over an hour passed before Stiles started to twitch and whimper in his sleep. Peter glanced over, considered waking him, but then decided it would probably be better to let the nightmare run its course. Only a few minutes later, however, the twitches had turned into full body shudders, and the whimpers had turned into moans and half-formed words.

Peter sighed a little, walked over to the bed, and gave Stiles’ shoulder a rough shake. His eyes opened and he flew into a sitting position. Peter saw him open his mouth, and he barely had time to clap a hand over it before Stiles could start screaming. Stiles flailed and fought against his grip, and for lack of a better option, Peter moved with him, rocked him back and forth. “It’s over, it’s all over,” he murmured. He couldn’t say ‘it’s okay’ or ‘you’re all right’ because those things were incredibly far from the truth. So he just kept Stiles caged in a tight grip and kept repeating what he could. “It’s over.”

Stiles eventually went limp in Peter’s grasp. “I’m sorry,” he said, his voice cracking. “I’m so sorry. I should’ve seen it. Scott, I’m so sorry.”

“It’s over, Stiles,” Peter said again. “Just breathe.”

Stiles drew in a shaky breath, and leaned more heavily against Peter. He seemed to return back to the present, lifting a trembling hand to wipe it over his eyes. “Oh,” he said, when he realized that Peter was holding onto him. “This is awkward.”

“You’re not wrong,” Peter said, loosening his grip, letting Stiles pull away.

“I guess I should have warned you,” Stiles said.

Peter just shook his head. “It didn’t exactly take me off guard.” He stood up and went back to the desk, picking up his glass of water.

“Do you still dream about the fire?” Stiles asked, looking at him in the dim light.

“All the time,” Peter said quietly.

Stiles wiped a hand over his eyes. He was quiet for a long time. When it became clear that he wasn’t going to say anything, at least not for a while, Peter started getting ready for bed. It was late, past two AM, and he needed to get some sleep. He closed his laptop, brushed his teeth, changed into a pair of gym shorts that he had taken to sleeping in. At his own place, he slept naked, but he very much doubted that Stiles would appreciate that.

Since Stiles was still sitting there, he said, “Do you want me to leave the lamp on for you?”

“No,” Stiles said, laying back down like he simply hadn’t realized he was still sitting there. Peter turned out the lamp and got in the other bed. He kept waiting for Stiles to say something, but he never did, and eventually Peter fell asleep. He slept fitfully, and when he woke up the next morning, there were dark circles underneath Stiles’ eyes and he couldn’t say for sure if the teenager had slept at all.

It was around ten, so they had breakfast and discussed their next move. Peter wanted to case the apartment complex where their third suspect lived, before they made any definite plans. It was better than he thought it might be. Rather than a large building with interior doors, it was set up more like the complex that Stiles lived in. Multiple small buildings, doors on the outside. So they wouldn’t have to worry about getting through a main door, or any security codes. He scanned for cameras and saw two, but they would be easy to avoid.

“What’s the plan?” Stiles asked, once they were back at the hotel.

“Well, if we can get her to open her door, I’m going to suggest a taser,” Peter said. “You have one; I saw it at your apartment the other day. That will take her down quick and quiet without risking a permanent injury. Then we can load her into the car and take her back to the loft.”

“Okay,” Stiles said, nodding.

“It’ll be getting her to open her door that will be a problem,” Peter continued.

Stiles stared pensively off into the distance for a minute before saying, “We need a disguise.”

Peter let out a snort of laughter despite himself. “Really. You’re going to paste on a fake mustache, maybe wear a baseball cap, and walk up to this woman’s front door?”

Stiles just continued to stare for a long minute before he stood up and said, “I’ll go put something together. It’ll take me a couple hours.”

Peter thought about arguing. He was in charge. But they had time, and he found himself curious about what Stiles would think was an adequate disguise. “You do that,” he said, still chuckling, and Stiles walked out of the hotel room without another word. Peter shook his head and turned the television on. He began to look through his e-mail while he watched it with half an eye. He had gotten some job offers, and although some had to be turned down, others weren’t time sensitive and could be held for future consideration.

It was about four PM when there was a knock on the door. Peter glanced at it, then hauled himself off the bed and went to answer it. He glanced through the peephole and saw a young woman standing there, so it was with caution that he pulled the door open. She was tall for a woman, and dressed like she was on her way to a nightclub, in a sparkly pink tank top and a little black skirt. Frizzy brown hair floated down her face and rested on her shoulders, and her makeup was heavy although he had seen worse. In addition to a number of necklaces, she wore a thin silk scarf wrapped around her –

Around _her –_

“Stiles?” Peter asked, sounding a little more shocked than he would have liked.

“Good, huh?” Stiles walked into the hotel room. Peter looked down automatically to see that he was wearing fishnet tights and little black boots. “My own dad wouldn’t recognize me like this. I know that for an actual fact, because he saw me in this get-up once.”

“Why – “ Peter wasn’t sure what question to ask first. “What – ”

“In my sophomore year of high school, I happened to make friends with a bunch of drag queens,” Stiles said. “We kept in touch over the years. After high school, when I was, you know, ‘exploring’ – ” He made air quotes around the word – “we used to go to Jungle together. Sometimes I would dress up like this, sometimes I wouldn’t. I lost my virginity to one of them. Good times.”

Peter stood back and watched him as he moved around the hotel room. Instead of his crutch, he had a slim black cane. It was less conspicuous, and blended in with the outfit. Nobody would notice it unless they were looking for it. He watched as Stiles leaned over the counter to reexamine his makeup and wipe away a stray eyelash. Completely without shame, he admired the view of Stiles’ legs and ass. “First you get annoyed at me for hitting on you, then you showed up here dressed like a hooker. How am I supposed to interpret that?”

“Admittedly, it isn’t the best way of staying under the radar,” Stiles said. “But you kind of have to do the makeup heavy to hide your masculinity, so it looks weird if you do that and then dress conservatively. I could do it if I had more time, but all the girl’s clothes I own are this sort of thing, so, this is what I had to work with.”

Having gotten over his surprise, Peter gave the outfit another look. He could see the logic to it, now. The huge, eighties hair – undoubtedly a wig – helped distract from the squareness of Stiles’ jaw and the broadness of his shoulders. All the necklaces and the gaudy earrings took away attention from the narrow scarf that he was using to hide his Adam’s apple. As for the clothes, they were covering enough that they would keep the important parts hidden.

“Did you shave your legs?” he asked, taking another glance at those fishnets. The boots only came up to his mid-calf.

“Obviously,” Stiles said. “Arms too.”

Peter leaned back and took in the whole outfit again. “I’ve got to hand it to you, Stiles, this is a real journey of self-discovery for me. The sight of you in that outfit is doing terrible things to my blood pressure.”

“I’m glad to hear that you’re a lech no matter what I’m wearing,” Stiles replied, untangling a wisp of hair from his earrings.

“You know,” Peter said, “I noticed you haven’t actually turned me down.”

Stiles picked up his purse and his cane. “Let’s get moving.”

For the absolute first time, things actually went off without a hitch. Peter parked as close to the woman’s door as he could and let Stiles out. He watched as Stiles went up and rang the woman’s bell. She answered it with a questioning look on her face, and Stiles gave her a bright smile and then put the taser in her abdomen. He didn’t even have to say a word – which was a good thing, as it surely would have given him away.

Peter was out of the car and in the apartment moments later. He shut the door behind them as Stiles laid the possible witch down on the floor. “What if she isn’t one of them?” Peter asked, curious about what Stiles would do in these circumstances.

“Same thing as yesterday. We take a bunch of her stuff and leave it somewhere. Burglary gone wrong. Or right.” Stiles tilted his head to one side with a listening expression on his face. “But it’s her. I can feel it.”

“You know, it’s hard to take you seriously in that outfit,” Peter said. Stiles made no response, so he added, “Pun intended.”

“God, do you always think with your dick?” Stiles asked. “I had no idea you were such a pervert.”

“I tend not to be a cocktease, as you put it,” Peter said. “I wouldn’t have fucked you when you were sixteen, so there was no point in hitting on you.”

“How gallant.”

Peter shrugged. “I just prefer to be efficient. No point wasting effort on people who aren’t worth my time.”

“So I wasn’t when I was sixteen, but I am now?”

“Most definitely,” Peter said.

While they were talking about this, Stiles was going through the woman’s things. It didn’t take him long to confirm that she was part of the coven, although her collection of supernatural paraphernalia was nowhere near as extensive as the one from the day before. “Maybe you were right and we were just unlucky,” Stiles mused, “and the woman yesterday was one of the coven’s high priestesses.”

“It would be nice if that were true,” Peter agreed. “Let’s get moving.”

Luckily, the woman was on the small side. They were able to load her into a rolling suitcase that they had brought, and take her out to the car. Twenty minutes later, they were at the loft. The witch was stirring and moaning, so Peter had to be quick getting her chained up. Stiles put a circle of mountain ash around her, with Peter inside it. There was nothing else inside for her to use against him, so unless she was strong enough to cast directly on him, she wouldn’t have many options.

When she came to, she screamed and started struggling against the chains. Her eyes went black and she hissed and swore. Peter decided to let her get the dramatics out of her system. It took several long minutes before she came to the inevitable conclusion that she was trapped. “Now, then,” Peter said pleasantly. “Let’s have a little chat.”

It started off fairly typical. A lot of swearing, occasional screaming, reluctant tears as things progressed. Stiles waited on the outside of the mountain ash and handed Peter whatever tools he requested. He had a good set, put together over years of work both supernatural and mundane. He kept things low-key, because it didn’t help if the witch passed out or died.

He half-expected Stiles to protest as things started to escalate. But Stiles just stood on the outside of the circle, waiting for her to break. He didn’t say a word the entire time, which Peter actually found somewhat unnerving. In fact, at least part of the time he wasn’t even paying attention, as he removed his makeup and changed back into regular clothes.

It took about two hours for the witch to start talking. She confirmed that their coven had thirteen members, and that the one who had been killed was one of three priestesses. She told them about the sacrifices they had been making, the rituals to gain more power. But one thing she didn’t give them was the names of the other witches in the coven.

“I don’t know, I don’t know,” she sobbed, whenever asked. “We never said. None of us. We all had names we called each other, that was all. I can – I can give you those.”

But ‘those’ weren’t helpful. They seemed like old Native American names to Peter. ‘Black Water’, ‘She Who Sees’, ‘Night Lily’.

“That sounds like a My Little Pony, are you joking with me?” Peter asked, not impressed, pushing his claws closer to the woman’s eye.

“It’s what we used,” she cried. “We couldn’t use real names. It was too dangerous. Please . . .”

Stiles finally stirred. “She doesn’t know,” he said. “We’re done here.”

Peter glanced at him. “We don’t know that yet.”

“She’s told us shit about her coven that a low ranking witch like her shouldn’t even _know_ ,” Stiles said. “You broke her, okay? Good job. It’s pointless to keep torturing her.”

There was a pause while Peter folded his arms over his chest and regarded Stiles. “Between the two of us, who has more experience with torturing people for information?”

Stiles’ gaze flitted to Peter’s face and then away. “You.”

“And between the two of us, which one of us is in charge of this operation?”

“You,” Stiles said, somewhat sullenly.

“Then be quiet. I’m working.”

Stiles’ jaw set in a stubborn expression that reminded Peter of days long past, and he marched over and kicked his shoe through the mountain ash, breaking the circle. “You’re _wasting time_. We should be thinking about what our next move is.”

“Our next move is to continue questioning her until we get the identity of at least one other coven member from her,” Peter said. “She knows at least one other. Do you know how I know that? Because these women are a large group of people who spend time together. They’re going to form friendships inside the circle. She’ll be closer to one or two others, especially because she’s a low-ranking witch and there’s probably some resentment, some power plays, some backstabbing. This woman knows the true identity of at least one other member of her coven, and I’m going to find out what it is, and if you want me to help you avenge your pack, you will shut the hell up and stop making her think that one of us is a bleeding heart and that if she cries enough, you’ll stop me.”

“That’s not what this is about,” Stiles snapped.

“Is it not?” Peter replied.

Stiles’ mouth twisted. “I’m not stopping you because I want to save her. She helped murder my friends. But I don’t _enjoy_ this. Not the way you do. I’m not like you. Just because I want revenge doesn’t mean I am. You killed your own niece, for Christ’s sake, so don’t stand there and try to say that I’m anything like _you_.”

Peter grabbed Stiles by the throat and pushed him up against the wall. “Let’s be clear on one thing,” he said quietly. “You don’t know me, Stiles. You don’t know anything about me.”

“I know enough – ”

“You think spending a couple of years watching Derek brood makes you an expert on the Hale family?” Peter replied. “You asked for my help. _You_ came to _me_. So I’ll thank you to keep your opinions about what I’ve done and what I’m doing to yourself, and if you – ”

There was a sharp crack from across the room. Peter whirled around and both of them stared as the woman’s body began to contort and spasm. Then it went limp in the restraints, head lolling at an unnatural angle. Blood trickled out of the corner of her mouth.

“Fuck,” Peter hissed. He knew she was dead before he went to check on her, but did it anyway. The only question was whether she had done it to herself, or whether the coven’s priestess had cast on her from a distance. Easier to kill her than to save her. He rounded on Stiles and said, “Get her down.” He thought about making some sarcastic comment like ‘I hope you’re satisfied’, but decided against it. Stiles looked a little green around the gills. There was no point in pushing him, at least not now. “Put the spiral on her.”

“What are we going to do with her?” Stiles asked, letting her body drop to the ground with a thud. He picked up one of Peter’s knives and began carving a spiral into her stomach, where Peter hadn’t done much damage.

“We’re going to leave her body somewhere it’ll be found,” Peter said, packing up his things. “Then we’re going to take her stuff and deposit it in another lake. Then we’re going to do nothing, because we didn’t get enough information from her to have a next move, and we’re temporarily at a dead end.”

Stiles swallowed and said, “Okay.”

A tarp would be too noticeable, and a brand new one could be tracked down, Peter decided. He left Stiles at the loft to guard the body while he went to a local thrift store and bought a large blanket. It gave him a little time to get over his annoyance. He wasn’t sure why he had reacted to Stiles like that. The younger man had made him more angry than he had been in a long time.

Stiles _was_ like him, Peter thought, and had no right to judge him.

They rolled the body in the blanket. Peter was annoyed because they had surely left hairs and fabric threads and skin particles all over it, but Stiles had the idea of dumping her in the community pool. That would get rid of most of the evidence. Peter agreed, and they loaded her back into the car. The pool was deserted. He had to climb over the fence. Stiles tried to follow, but couldn’t get over it because of his leg. Peter carried the body over to the pool himself and dropped it into the water.

Once that was done, they took the woman’s things, along with the suitcase and the blanket they had wrapped her in, and drove out of town. There weren’t a lot of lakes in the area, so they went back to the same one. That didn’t thrill Peter either, but with the bags weighted down, nobody should ever find them.

All of this was done in silence, and then Peter drove them back to the hotel. Once the door was closed behind them, he turned to Stiles and said quietly, “If you talk to me like that again, we’re done. Is that clear?”

Stiles swallowed hard and nodded. “Yes,” he said. He waited another beat and then said, awkwardly, “I – I’m s – ”

“And if you apologize to me, I will remove your spleen with my bare hands,” Peter said. “Is _that_ clear?”

Stiles nodded again.

“Good. Get some sleep.”

“I’m supposed to sleep in the same hotel room as you when you’re this pissed off at me?”

Peter arched an eyebrow at Stiles. “I’m not angry, Stiles. I just want to be clear on what is and is not acceptable behavior. For example, you asked me not to mention your pack. I haven’t. You told me not to call you by your real name. I haven’t. So, I’m telling you not to talk about my family. And you won’t. Now get some sleep. It’s late.”

Stiles nodded one more time. He went into the bathroom and changed, then started doing his physical therapy exercises. Peter decided to take a shower. He was pretty grimy from all the torture and moving the body around. He took his time, and when he came out of the bathroom, Stiles had turned off all the lights except the one by the desk, and gotten into bed. His eyes were closed. Peter sat down at the desk to get some work down.

“I know that you like Buffy,” Stiles said.

Peter half-turned. “Pardon?”

“You said I didn’t know anything about you. But I do. I know that you like Buffy the Vampire Slayer and that Spike is your favorite character,” Stiles said. “I know that you prefer spicy food over sweet food. I know that you have an unhealthy obsession with deep V-neck shirts and that you drive a Honda because sometimes it pays to be inconspicuous. I know that you’re helping me because I remind you of yourself.”

“Oh, really? How do you know that?” Peter asked.

“Because it’s the only reason you would help me,” Stiles said, rolling onto his side. “You don’t care about me being your emissary. You know I probably won’t survive this. You’re helping me because you see yourself in me. And maybe you wish that there had been someone to help you.”

“I managed quite capably, thank you,” Peter said, but he didn’t deny what Stiles was saying. There was no point in that. “Go to sleep, Stiles.”

Stiles closed his eyes. A few minutes later, his breathing was deep and even. Peter watched him sleep for what felt like a long time.

 

~ ~ ~ ~


	4. Chapter 4

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I just want to warn everybody that I cried while writing this chapter. That never happens. So, uh, you have been warned. Set aside some kitten gifs.

 

Peter woke the next morning abruptly, to a thud and a noise he couldn’t quite identify. He had heard Stiles moving around the hotel room somewhat peripherally, but was gradually growing used to the noises that Stiles made. This was different. He sat up, shaking off the vestiges of sleep, and looked around. He didn’t see Stiles anywhere at first, but when he got out of bed, he found the teenager curled up on his side on the floor. “What are you doing down there?”

“Tried to get up and I – oh God – ” Stiles said. One fist clenched so tightly that his knuckles turned white. “My fucking leg gave out and I – ”

Peter assessed the situation. “You were very active yesterday, climbing up and down the stairs to your apartment and the loft, helping move the body around. It’s not surprising that it would be giving you trouble today.”

“God, it _hurts_ – ” Stiles choked off a sob. “In my bag – there’s an orange bottle – ”

Peter rolled his eyes and knelt down next to the teenager. He rested his hand on Stiles’ ankle, where there was bare skin available, and started to draw the pain out. It would work a lot faster than pain pills, although it wouldn’t last as long. And he had to admit that he was curious. When he pulled the pain out, he could feel it, measure its magnitude and effect.

The intensity of it took him off guard. This wasn’t some ache or twinge. This pain was deep, terrible agony. It was the pain of burns, the pain of silver. It crawled through his system and dissipated as the wolf healing took care of it, but he was left somewhat shaken despite himself.

Stiles let out a gasping noise of relief. “Oh Jesus,” he said. “Oh my God. Thank you. Peter.” He reached out and grabbed Peter by the wrist, squeezing hard. “Thank you.”

Peter pulled away and went to Stiles’ bag. He looked through and found the orange bottle, or actually several. As he suspected, it was no half-assed painkiller like extra-strength Motrin. This was real stuff, heavy stuff. “It says you’re supposed to take one of these every six hours, but I’ve never seen you touch it.”

“Yeah.” Stiles clawed his way into a sitting position. He was pale and looked haggard. “I don’t . . . I don’t like to. I’m afraid I’ll get addicted.”

“To what? Not being in mind-bending agony?” Peter rolled his eyes. “If you’re in pain, you should take the pills. Pain slows you down. It fogs your thinking. Pain is an enemy when you’re trying to accomplish something.”

“I can’t,” Stiles said. Tears were slowly sliding down his cheeks. “I just can’t. Scott . . . I think of Scott and I . . . I’m alive and he’s not. The pain is how I know I’m alive.”

“No.” Peter set the bottle down on the table. “The fact that you’re breathing, that your heart is beating, is how you know you’re alive. Pain is just a distraction, Stiles. It’s a way for you to punish yourself for not being able to save your pack. It’s unnecessary.”

“Even so,” Stiles argued, “I can’t just drug myself all the time.”

“This isn’t the kind of painkiller that will give you a high, unless you crush it up and snort it, anyway. This is to kill pain, that’s all. You’re just upset because you feel like you shouldn’t need the pills. That needing them makes you weak.”

“Doesn’t it?” Stiles asked.

Peter gave a little shrug. “You survived something that nobody else did. Yes, I know Scott saved you. But you survived after that. The Nemeton is miles from the school, Stiles. How did you even get there? Did you crawl on your belly the entire way? Did you manage to get to your feet and walk on a broken leg? Somehow you got there. You saved yourself.” He knelt down next to Stiles and put the bottle next to him. “Not only did you do that, but you’re up and walking six months later. The physical therapy for the kind of injury you had would’ve broken most of the people I’ve ever known. You’re strong, Stiles. Two of the coven are dead. I know it doesn’t feel like much, but trust me, to them, it’s terrifying. They know you’re coming for them. They _fear_ you, Stiles. They’re afraid, and you are so much stronger than you think you are.”

Stiles looked at him in open astonishment for a long minute, then wiped the tears off his cheeks. “What’s with the pep talk?”

“Your whining is annoying.” Peter stood. “If you want my help, you’ll take your painkillers.”

Stiles shook his head a little at Peter’s response, then hauled himself to his feet. He leaned heavily on the wall as he got himself a glass of water. Peter went over to his bag and started looking through it. There were three more bottles, and pulled them out. The first was his Adderall, and he dropped it back into the bag. “Ambien,” he said.

“To help me sleep,” Stiles said. “It works, but I feel like death the next morning. Thanks but no thanks.”

Peter nodded and put the bottle back. “And lorazepam.”

“For panic attacks.” Stiles looked directly at Peter as he said this, as if challenging him to say something about it.

Peter tucked that bottle away as well. “We’ll have to take today off,” he said. “We won’t be able to do anything with you in this condition.”

“I’ll be fine, I can use my crutch – ”

Peter sat down on the edge of the bed. “No. You need to rest, or it will get worse. This is a subject with which I am intimately familiar, Stiles. Do you think I didn’t want to go kill all of them in one go? I did. But I had to wait. I was weak, and in pain myself. My body had rotted out from underneath me while I was in that coma. The pain had driven me so far into myself that I almost never came out. Recovery is two steps forward, one step back. And if you don’t give yourself time to actually recover it becomes two steps forward, three steps back. Patience is a virtue, and it’s absolutely crucial to a vendetta. If you get impatient, you rush, you make mistakes.”

“I just . . .” Stiles’ voice trailed off, and then he nodded. “Yeah. You’re right.”

“In any case, we’re without a move at the moment,” Peter said. He was careful to address this without a note of accusation in his voice. “The police have found the body of the banker by now. They’ll find the body of the second witch soon if they haven’t already. They’ll investigate. They’ll pull their phone records, look at their email. And anything they find, you can get access to. That’s how we’ll find our next witch. But until they’ve done the preliminary investigation, we’re stuck. So there’s no harm in you taking a day.”

“I guess you’re right about that, too,” Stiles said. “Not that I have any idea what I’m going to do all day.”

“Well, first of all, take your pain pills. The help I gave you will only last about ten or fifteen minutes.”

“Yeah, I’m familiar with the effects of the pain drain,” Stiles said. He opened the bottle and tapped two of the pills into his palm, then took them with a swallow of water. “I guess I’ll see if Deaton emailed me back.”

The information they had gotten from the second witch had been helpful, but only to an extent. As a low-ranking member of the coven, she wasn’t completely familiar with the purposes behind all the sacrifices. She had called them ‘compatibility sacrifices’, and the email from Deaton used the same term. “They find someone similar to themselves, and absorb their life force,” Stiles read from the letter. “That explains why they were all women, and the ages were all fairly similar.”

Peter nodded. “The question that remains is whether or not police will assume the new deaths are the same perpetrator or not.”

“I doubt it,” Stiles said. “The victim might be similar, but the crime itself is completely different.” He looked up at his crime wall. “On the upside, that means that we now have more information about our coven members than before, if the dead women are similar.”

He tried to get off the bed and start working on the information, but Peter wouldn’t let him. Instead, the werewolf pinned the pictures where Stiles directed him, moved the lists where they needed to go. They compared photographs and characteristics for several hours. “It just seems an odd tactic to take,” Stiles finally said. “This increases their power, but it doesn’t really give them anything they didn’t already have, like the ability to heal or physical strength.”

“The five-fold knot was a very rare spell, though,” Peter said. “Otherwise, I would have realized what Jennifer Blake was doing right away. It was Chris Argent who figured that out, and for all his faults, he was a highly intelligent man. Besides, the five-fold knot would require fifteen deaths for each individual coven member. That would be extremely slow and would only help one member of the coven at a time. This is a good way to increase the coven’s overall power in a short amount of time. How many murders have there been?”

“Thirty-one.”

“Jesus,” Peter said. “I’m surprised it hasn’t been national news. But I suppose there’s always been this sort of cone of silence around supernatural towns.” He shook his head slightly. “In any case, that’s getting close to three sacrifices per coven member. And covens are like packs in some ways. Each individual adds strength to the whole. Even the lower-ranking members will make the coven more powerful in an exponential sort of way.”

Stiles nodded and studied the wall. “Which also means, the longer we wait, the more difficult it will get.”

“That’s not news,” Peter said. “It was always like that and always will be. They’re aware now, or at least they will be very soon, that we’re coming after them. They’ll be on their guard, travel in groups, not open their doors. The first two were the easiest. It’s going to get much more difficult.” He glanced over at Stiles and continued, “What I find truly interesting about the witch last night is how she didn’t know anything about the Nemeton. She didn’t even know why her coven had come here, let alone why it had been necessary to obliterate the local pack before they could settle.”

“That’s something the priestesses probably kept to themselves,” Stiles said. “The Nemeton is so powerful, they probably don’t want anyone plotting against them.”

“Fair enough. Are you still drawing power off the Nemeton?”

Stiles nodded. “As long as I’m in Beacon Hills. I can, can feel it, like . . . a live wire that runs underneath the ground.”

“Then we’ll have to be careful. They could use that to track you down.” Peter shook his head and stood. “I’ve got cabin fever. I’m going out for a bit, while it’s still light out. Stay here and don’t move around much.”

Stiles gave him a sloppy salute. Peter rolled his eyes and left the hotel room. He decided to walk down to the Nemeton just to make sure that it hadn’t been disturbed. It was nice out. The weather was good, and the further he got out of town, the more the rotten smell faded and stopped bothering him.

The Nemeton was exactly as it had been years previous. It looked untouched. He could catch Stiles’ scent there, very faintly, but nothing else. Certainly nobody else. If the coven was aware of the Nemeton – and he was sure that the priestesses were – then they hadn’t been there physically. That made sense. The witches would have no way of knowing whether or not it had any supernatural defenses. They were probably gathering power before they made an attempt to use it. A cautious strategy that he approved of. But he suspected that Stiles’ vendetta would force their hand. They would make an attempt to control the Nemeton’s power sooner rather than later.

It was looking like it might be a long night in the hotel room with just the two of them, so he laid in some provisions. When he got back to the hotel, Stiles was watching television. From the looks of it, he hadn’t moved since Peter had left some hours earlier, and Peter nodded in approval. “So, the second witch’s body has been found,” Stiles greeted him.

“Good,” Peter said, and Stiles nodded.

“It’s all over the news,” he continued. “Since we took her ID, she hasn’t been identified yet. But she will be by the end of the night. Even if the coven doesn’t call the police, when she misses her shift tonight, her boss probably will. They’ll pull all her financials and phone records and stuff. We should be able to get what we need tomorrow.”

“Excellent,” Peter said, and pulled out the phone book. “Is it possible to get decent Chinese in this two-horse town?”

“Oh, yeah,” Stiles said, and actually took out his own phone. “Dragon Palace. What do you want?”

“Mongolian beef. Hot and sour soup, and egg rolls.”

Stiles nodded and dialed. He placed an order for both of them, gave the hotel room number, and said they would pay in cash. While he was doing that, Peter was sorting through his purchases. Stiles watched as he took out a new DVD player and started hooking it up to the television. “You’re that bored?”

Peter glanced at his watch. “It’s seven o’clock. I don’t know about you, but I won’t be thinking about sleep for another six hours at minimum. That’s a long time to be trapped in a hotel room with nothing to do, so I picked some things up.” He tossed the bag over to Stiles.

“Oh,” Stiles said, and blinked at the DVD set of Buffy the Vampire Slayer. “Why season two? Shouldn’t we start at the beginning?”

Peter scoffed. “Everyone knows season two is the best season.”

“I . . . actually can’t argue with that even a little,” Stiles said.

They watched television until it was late. Stiles got up to do his physical therapy but could only manage to do half of it. Without needing to be told, he took his pain pills and then stretched back out on the bed. He was asleep before much longer.

Peter slept in, despite Stiles’ concerted efforts for other things to happen. He was up at dawn, on the phone with one of his friends at the police station. Then he left the hotel room without waiting for Peter to get up. Peter suspected he was on his way to the station, and had a feeling that he had taken his car. He thought about getting up in arms about it, but decided he would rather sleep. When Stiles was focused, nothing was going to stand in his way, and there was no point in getting annoyed over petty shit like ownership of the car.

By the time he was up and dressed for the day, Stiles was swimming in new paperwork, and the murder wall had gained a new dimension – that of their own murders. He ate cold Chinese food for breakfast while Stiles talked a mile a minute about what he had discovered. There were women’s faces all over the wall now. It was a little disconcerting, to be honest.

“So I have two more probable coven members,” Stiles said. “Both of them women that witch number two texted back and forth with a lot. They’re both new in town, although it didn’t come up on my first search because neither has bought property. They both match victims of the compatibility sacrifices, and here’s an interesting tidbit – they both do their banking at First National downtown, where witch number one worked.”

“Okay,” Peter said. “Where do they live and work?”

Witch number three was a paralegal who lived in a condominium on the south side of town. Witch number four was a schoolteacher – something that amused Peter – who had an apartment downtown. She was going to be next to impossible to get to, so Peter put her aside for the time being. That might have to wait until after the witches were actively coming after them.

The paralegal worked long hours, which annoyed Peter, but there wasn’t much they could do about it. Stiles donned his drag outfit again – this time with a shiny yellow shirt and turquoise miniskirt – and they parked outside the condo and waited. She got home at about seven, so it was already dark, pulled directly into her garage, and closed the door.

“Damn,” Peter said. He hadn’t been expecting anything else, but it would have been nice. “Okay. Give her half an hour to settle in so it doesn’t feel like she was followed.”

Stiles nodded and fidgeted. He had become a little more mellow since he had started taking his pain medication, although he was still just as sharply focused as ever. He went up to the door half an hour later. Peter kept the window of the car rolled down so he could hear what was going on. When Stiles rang the bell, the door only opened a few inches, secured by a chain. “Can I help you?” the witch asked. Even from the other side of the road, Peter could smell her fear.

“Hey, uh . . .” Stiles spoke in a soft, husky voice, which Peter supposed was better than a falsetto. “My car has a flat and my phone’s battery is dead. Can I use yours?”

There was a pause. “I’ll call someone for you, but you can’t come in,” the woman said.

“Okay,” Stiles said, nodding agreement. “I just need to phone a friend.”

“Hang on.” She ducked away from the door and then came back. “Okay, what’s the number?”

Peter didn’t see exactly what happened next, but from the look of it, Stiles used the moments that she was distracted dialing her phone to jam his hand through the door and shoved the taser into her abdomen. He could hear the buzzing noise it made, and a few moments later he was on the front doorstep with Stiles. He forced the door open the rest of the way and they ducked inside.

It took three minutes to confirm that she was one of the coven. She was too heavyset to fit in their suitcase, but they found one of her own that would do. Peter filled theirs with various valuables that they could use to further perpetuate the myth that this had something to do with thieves. They also grabbed a blanket, two bottles of bleach, and some old rags that they could use to clean up when they were done at the loft. They loaded both suitcases into the car and headed for the loft.

This time, Stiles made no objections as Peter worked. He didn’t say a word. A lot of what they gathered was things they already knew, but they did find out some new tidbits. The coven was in a complete uproar over the deaths of the first two members, but as of yet they didn’t have any idea who was behind it. They had killed so many, and in a town like Beacon Hills, you could never know who was connected to the supernatural and who wasn’t. They had a lot of enemies.

Peter was pleased to hear that. He was equally pleased to extract three names from her, two of which were coven members that they hadn’t identified yet. Stiles said nothing while he did this, even though she insisted for hours that she didn’t know them, and it was nearing dawn before she finally broke.

They had enough to go on, and they needed time to dispose of the body before the sun rose, so Peter stood back at about four AM. He was tired, in any case, and they would need time during daylight the next day to plan their next move. “I’m finished,” he said. “She’s yours.”

Stiles looked at him for a moment, then nodded. He swept a hand through the mountain ash to let Peter out of the circle, and stepped close.

“Please,” the witch whimpered. “Please don’t hurt me.”

Rage lit up in Stiles’ eyes, and he took a knife off of Peter’s table of tools, driving it into her stomach. She tried to scream, but it just came out as a sob. “Why not?” he snarled. “After what you did to my pack. I’m going to put each and every one of you through the same pain that I live with every day. And you can’t stop me. _Nobody_ can stop me now.”

He twisted the knife as he pulled it out. Peter admired the wound. It would be a slow, painful death. He regretted the fact that they didn’t really have time for that. “Stiles,” he said quietly. “We need to dispose of her before the sun rises. I’m sorry, but you’ll have to be quick.”

Stiles’ gaze flitted over to him, and then he nodded. He grabbed the woman by the hair, pulling it back, and cut her throat in one quick motion. Blood went everywhere, and Peter thought about making a reproving comment, but, well, he had told Stiles to be quick, not neat.

He cut her down and crammed her body back into the suitcase. “Do you know where I think I’ll leave her?” he asked, smiling. “I think I’m going to park her outside another coven member’s doorstep.”

Stiles didn’t smile. But he did nod. “Yeah,” he said. “As a bonus, then the police will investigate them, and we’ll get information on them before we even have to kill them.”

“Stay here and clean up,” Peter said. “I’ll be back in an hour.”

“Okay,” Stiles said.

Peter carried the body down to the car and headed towards the house of one of the other coven members. It was one of the nicer ones, though from the records Stiles had pulled, she lived alone. So far, all of the coven members were unmarried, with no children, and he was starting to suspect that all of them would be. Which was fine, as it made things much easier on them.

There was a large oak tree in the front yard. Peter took some wire from his supplies and suspended her from the lowest branch. Then he used his claws to draw the spiral in the hard wood. He took a moment to admire his work before heading back to the loft. He didn’t want to leave Stiles alone for too long. But when he got back, he found that Stiles had done exactly as instructed. He had cleaned up all the blood, off both the floor and himself. He had changed clothes and was waiting in silence. Peter took out his phone and wordlessly showed him a picture of the woman’s body, hanging from the tree.

“Good,” Stiles said. “Three down, ten to go.”

“And two more identified for certain,” Peter said. “It will get both easier and harder. They know about us, they’ll be on guard, but if they come after us, that means we don’t have to look for them.”

“I hope they do.” Stiles’ fists clenched and unclenched. “But a quick death is too good for them. Any of them.”

Peter quirked an eyebrow and said, “Good, good. Let the hate flow through you.”

Stiles blinked at him in surprise. For the first time, a smile touched his lips, and Peter wished it hadn’t. It was a ghastly sight, a mockery of the real smile that had once graced Stiles’ face. Then the younger man said, “You know, Scott never saw Star Wars. It was kind of a running joke. We always meant to sit down and watch the whole trilogy. We just . . . never had time. There was always so much going on and we . . . I didn’t . . .” His face twisted in an obvious effort not to cry, but it was a battle that he was losing, fast. “And now he’ll never . . . he can’t . . .”

Stiles folded in on himself and sank to his knees, sobs shaking his entire body. Peter just stood there, feeling incompetent and ill-at-ease. It wasn’t often that he was at a loss, but he had no idea how to deal with this. He supposed it was healthy. He didn’t recall if he had ever cried over his family. Surely he must have. But nobody had been there to witness it, if he had.

He pulled himself together when Stiles choked out an apology and tried to gather himself together. For some reason, that bothered him. He sat down next to Stiles on the loft’s cold stone floor and smoothed down his hair with one hand. “No, don’t,” he said. “Let it out. You’ll feel better afterwards.” As if he were some sort of expert on this. He had never felt so adrift in his life. What was it about Stiles that got to him like this? Was Stiles right, in that he felt like he was looking at himself? Like he looked at Stiles and saw how alone and frightened and hurt he must have been, back then? If so, he hated it.

Stiles had to think his advice was decent, though, because he certainly took it. He crawled over and buried his face in Peter’s lap and just let everything go. He howled out his grief and his pain, one hand knotting in the leg of Peter’s pants, and he cried for what seemed like days.

The sun had fully risen by the time Stiles’ sobs trailed off. He gave a shudder or two and finally went still. Peter reached down and thumbed away the tears on his cheeks. “Better?” he asked.

“Yeah,” Stiles said, his voice hoarse. “Thanks.”

Peter nodded. He got to his feet and pulled Stiles up beside him. “Three down, ten to go,” he said, and Stiles repeated the words back to him. They locked up the loft and drove back to the hotel. Stiles collapsed into sleep almost immediately, not bothering to do more than kick off his shoes. Peter shook him awake long enough for him to take his pain medication, but then didn’t pester him. He was tired himself. He set the alarm for one o’clock, and went to bed.

 

~ ~ ~ ~


	5. Chapter 5

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Action scenes are the bane of my existence, why did I think writing a story about killing a bunch of witches was a good idea? -_-
> 
> Oh, right. I'm a sucker for angst.

 

Things were interesting the next day. The third witch’s body had been found just after dawn, when the witch who owned the house left it and saw her hanging there. She said she didn’t know her, but as Stiles had anticipated, the police had pulled her phone records to see if she was lying. They had more information to go on. “Cool, we even have a name,” Stiles said. “The Spiral Killer.”

Since Peter didn’t want to touch the woman whose house he had left the body at, their next target would be the other name he had extracted from witch number three. The first woman’s house would be under surveillance, and that was too risky, at least for now. But the other name was a waitress who lived and worked on the edge of town. “She’s not going to open the door,” Peter said. “No way, no how. As much as I’ve enjoyed your little drag show, it’s lived out its usefulness to us.”

“Maybe we should just break in,” Stiles said.

“One does not simply break in to a witch’s house,” Peter said.

Stiles turned and looked at him over his breakfast. “I can’t believe this. You’re actually a gigantic nerd. I never would have guessed that.”

Peter arched an eyebrow. “Is that a problem?”

“Yes,” Stiles said. “It’s a huge problem. It actually makes you sort of likable and I’m not even sure what to do with that.”

Peter shrugged. “That is a problem,” he said, “but it’s your problem, not mine, so keep it to yourself. It looks like the apartment building she lives in has a parking garage. Let’s try to ambush her at her car.”

“Okay.” Stiles flipped through his files until he found the witch’s car information. They drove around the parking lot until they found it. It was an underground garage, which was even better. Fewer spectators. There were cameras, though, and Stiles carefully mapped them all out. They wouldn’t be able to park next to the witch and simply grab her, because the parking spots were reserved, and an unfamiliar car next to hers would send up warning flags.

In the end, they parked in a lot nearby and waited in the garage without their car. They wouldn’t be able to kidnap this one, Peter warned. Not with this setup. They would have to settle for a simple death. Stiles was content with that, and Peter didn’t think it mattered. They had enough to go on for now, and with Stiles’ connections to the police, every witch they killed would bring them more information.

They didn’t really have the room for an extensive brawl, and Peter wanted to kill the witch as quickly and efficiently possible. That made this one his target. Stiles was capable of killing someone, clearly, but not in one blow, not with limited space available. He could use his shotgun, he said, but Peter didn’t want to attract the attention. After some discussion, Stiles agreed that he didn’t need to kill every witch personally, as long as they ended up dead.

When it happened, it happened fast. The woman walked through the door that led into the apartment building and headed straight for her car. Peter waited until she had her keys out. As soon as she stopped to open the door, he leapt out and simply slammed her head down into the car.

That was how he planned it, at least. But at the last minute she got one hand up and produced a wave of power that pushed her car forward several feet and flung both herself and Peter backwards. He stayed on his feet, but lost his grip on her. She wheeled around with a screech, and everything around them began to move. The cars were flung backwards. One of the pillars crumbled, and the signs shattered.

Out of the corner of his eye, Peter saw Stiles get knocked backwards by a chunk of flying metal and get slammed into the wall. He stumbled and then landed in a heap. Peter swore, and leapt forward. The witch was expecting the move, but not the speed and strength with which he made it. She had just raised her hand to perform another spell when the heel of Peter’s hand impacted with her nose. The strength of the blow practically caved her face in. She reeled backwards and landed in a heap on the cold concrete.

“Shit,” Peter swore. That had been a lot of noise. In a town like Beacon Hills, people would probably call the police rather than investigate on their own, but they still needed to get out of the garage sooner rather than later. He grabbed Stiles underneath the armpits and hauled him to his feet. “You all right?”

“Yep, peachy, I, whoa,” Stiles said, as he tried to take a few steps forward and the ground wasn’t where he thought it would be. “I think I might throw up.”

Peter cradled Stiles’ face in his hands and watched as Stiles tried to focus on him. “Follow my finger,” he said, moving it back and forth in front of Stiles’ face, but the younger man’s eyes seemed to be everywhere at once. “You have a concussion, and probably a bad one,” Peter said. “We need to get you to the hospital.”

“Ffffffuck,” Stiles groaned, but he didn’t protest as Peter half-carried him back to the car. They left the body of the witch on the floor of the garage.

“Don’t pass out,” Peter said, as he drove.

“S’a myth,” Stiles said. “Keepin’ people with concussions ‘wake. Doesn’ matter.”

“I’ll take your word on it,” Peter said. He pulled up in front of the Beacon Hills hospital’s emergency room entrance. Stiles wobbled and couldn’t stay on his feet, so he had to get the other man’s arm over his shoulders and bring him inside. “You fell,” he said, as they were walking. “Because of your leg. You hit your head on a chair on your way down. Do you understand?”

“Got it,” Stiles said, as the doors whooshed open in front of them.

“Stiles!” a startled voice said from behind the desk. Peter blinked at the woman and realized he should have expected her to be there. Melissa McCall had changed over the years, but not as much as Stiles had. She was easily recognizable, even though he had never spent much time with her. A few more wrinkles, a few gray hairs, but other than that, Melissa McCall was exactly as she had been. “Are you okay?”

“I fell,” Stiles said, wavering as Peter helped him into a seat. “M’leg gave out. Knocked my head.”

“Thanks, Mr. . . ?” Melissa began, and then she got a look at Peter and her eyes went wide. “Mr. Hale,” she said, barely missing a beat. “Stiles, follow my finger,” she said, and Stiles gamely put up with that even though he had already done it. Before much longer, Stiles had been whisked away to see a doctor and get a CT scan to check for internal bleeding. Peter sat down with a magazine to wait.

It had only been about ten minutes when someone sat down in the chair next to him. Peter glanced over and saw Melissa settling into it. “I know why you’re here,” she said.

Peter folded the magazine and put it down. “Do you?”

“Yes.” Melissa pushed a hand through her hair, leaving her curls in disarray. “When he said he was going out of town for a few days, I thought . . . and when he came back the other night, he looked different. He looked alive for the first time in months. Like he had found a reason to breathe again.”

There was a long moment of silence while Peter regarded her. “And what are you going to do about it?”

“Nothing.” Melissa knotted her hands in her lap. “I loved Scott more than anything else in the world. He died fighting for what he believed in, and . . . that helps me keep going. I wake up every morning and I’m able to face a day without my son because I know that he would want me to be strong, to keep living my life and helping other people, and trying to keep Beacon Hills safe. I know that Scott wouldn’t want Stiles to do this. But he was my _son_ and I can’t . . .” Her voice trailed off. “If I can’t stop Stiles, and I know that I can’t, then I’ll support him. Because he’s all I have left.”

Peter nodded. “I’m sure it will help him to hear that.”

Melissa let out a breath. “Please take care of him.”

“I’ll do everything in my power to make sure harm doesn’t come to him,” Peter told her.

“If you betray him . . .” Melissa’s voice trailed away again. “I can’t threaten you. The idea is a joke. But if you betray him, I hope you die slowly.”

Peter rose to his feet. “I’ll keep that in mind,” he said, and walked away. It would be a while before Stiles was ready to go anywhere. The ER was busy – it seemed like the Beacon Hills ER always was – and so there was no point in sitting around. He needed to stretch his legs. It was interesting to see how the hospital had changed since he had last been there. They had added a new wing, remodeled part of the outside.

But part of it was exactly how he remembered. The long-term care ward, where he had spent so many years, struggling to come to terms with what had happened to his family and what he was going to do about it. He walked down the hallway slowly. An aide gave him a questioning look but didn’t stop him. Peter wondered what the hell he was doing there, when a nameplate on one of the doors caught his eye. ‘T. Stilinski’. He pushed open the door and went inside.

Melissa hadn’t changed over the years, but the former sheriff had. Peter thought most of that was because of his current circumstances. He was lying in the hospital bed, his eyes open but vague, staring at some fixed point in the distance. He wasn’t on a respirator or have anything that looked like life support, but he had more tubes and wires than Peter had had. His body was covered with a pale blue blanket.

With nothing to hold the lines of the sheriff’s worried frown in place, his skin sagged and looked slack. His face was pale, and his hair had a lot more gray in it than it had had before. Peter stood there for a moment, watching Stiles’ father, the way there was simply nothing left behind his gaze. It was gut-wrenching in a way that he didn’t think he could truly understand.

“Okay, now, I _don’t_ know what you’re doing in here.” It was Melissa’s voice again, and this time she sounded angry. “You have no business in here.”

Peter half-turned, and decided the truth would suit him better than any pretty words. “I just came to look around the old homestead and saw his name on the door. I thought seeing him might help me understand Stiles better.”

Melissa’s jaw clenched. “You can _never_ understand what this means to Stiles. Do you know, he was actually okay for about thirty minutes after the explosion. When the paramedics got there, he was up and talking, trying to give directions. They had search and rescue looking for – the bodies. And he was frantic because nobody could find Stiles. We didn’t know that he had left on his own steam.

“By the time they convinced him to come to the hospital, he was starting to get confused, disoriented. They took him to get a scan right away, and then to surgery, but . . . there was just too much damage. We didn’t find Stiles until the next day, when a jogger found him. He had crawled away from the Nemeton and then just collapsed.

“Stiles knew Scott was dead, he knew he had lost his pack, but he still thought his dad might be okay. He hadn’t been inside, he could have survived. I had to tell him what had happened. I had to tell him that his father was lying here in bed with brain damage that a human body would never overcome. I had to watch his heart break. I think if it had just been the pack – ” Melissa’s voice cracked and then steadied. “Maybe he could have been all right again someday. It always would have hurt, but – but not this. This is what broke him.”

Peter nodded quietly. “I’m sorry,” he said.

“Are you?” she asked. “Are you _really_? After everything you put Scott and his friends through, do you really dare stand in this room and tell me that you’re sorry?”

“Yes,” Peter said, “because this wasn’t my fault. And because I do understand how Stiles feels.”

Melissa sighed and scrubbed both hands through her hair. “Okay. I guess I can’t argue with that.”

Peter considered for a minute. “What are you doing down here, anyway? You can’t have been looking for me.”

“Of course not,” Melissa said. “It’s my lunch break. I usually come down to visit him for a few minutes each day. It doesn’t . . . it isn’t like it matters. But I feel like someone should be here. And Stiles . . . he hasn’t come back since that first day. I don’t think he can, and frankly, I can’t blame him.”

There was an awkward silence. In an effort to lighten things up, Peter gestured to her hand as she pushed it through her hair again. “You remarried, I see. And to think I was considering asking you out again. Who’s the lucky fellow?”

Melissa gave him a sharp look, as if she suspected that he might be trying to antagonize her. Peter didn’t understand why, until Melissa just gestured to the man in the hospital bed.

“Oh,” Peter said, and grimaced. “That . . . I’m sorry.”

“Please go away, Peter,” Melissa said. “Stiles’ CT came back negative for any bleeding. He’ll be cleared to leave in about half an hour.”

“All right,” Peter said, and headed back up to the waiting room. Stiles came out about forty-five minutes later, wobbling slightly and leaning heavily on his crutch. Peter didn’t say anything about his father as he drove them back to the hotel. He didn’t feel like there was anything he could say. It wasn’t until they got back and he had parked the car that he spoke again. “Four down, nine to go.”

Stiles nodded and just closed his eyes.

 

~ ~ ~ ~

 

It was clear that they were going to be taking a few days off, whether Stiles liked it or not. Peter didn’t know a lot about the typical rate of human healing, but the doctor at the ER made it clear that Stiles could have symptoms for days or even weeks, and that rest was crucial. For once, Stiles didn’t argue. He looked like he felt too awful to even think about it.

“Not just physical rest, but cognitive rest,” the doctor said, and that did make Stiles look somewhat mutinous. Peter gave a snort as if to indicate that he didn’t think Stiles knew what cognitive rest was. “I’m not saying we have to put you in a dark room without any stimuli,” the doctor continued, “but don’t go doing crossword puzzles or trying to solve the mystery of the Lindberg baby.”

Since this was amusingly close to what Stiles _was_ doing, Peter couldn’t help but smirk. Stiles gave him a look like he was thinking about the best way to remove Peter’s eyeballs. They went back to the hotel. Peter put on the Buffy DVDs, made Stiles lie down, and told him that if he tried to do anything strenuous, he would hogtie him and put a pillowcase over his head.

“You’re a jerk,” Stiles told him.

“That isn’t exactly news,” Peter replied.

He wasn’t thrilled about the setback himself, to be honest. Some preliminary research indicated that symptoms of a concussion could last up to fifty days, and that they more activity one did, the longer they would last. Stiles indicated that he didn’t care, but Peter figured a few days of rest probably wouldn’t go amiss.

Every day they wasted would give their enemy time to marshal against them, but he was comforted by the fact that thus far, their enemy seemed to have no idea who they were. That would give them some time.

“Why’re you still here?” Stiles asked, almost an hour later, as Peter was changing out the DVDs.

Peter glanced over his shoulder at the teenager where he was slouched on the bed. “Beg pardon?”

“You said you’d cut an’ run as soon as it got dangerous,” Stiles said. His voice was a little slurred, and he seemed tired, but coherent. “That firs’ witch nearly killed you. Then today. She coulda blowed us both up.”

Peter shrugged. “I’ve lived through worse.”

“No, I know that, but I . . . I didn’t think you were coming back. When Melissa told me she was going to go get you, so you could take me home or wherever, but then she didn’t come back for the longest time. I figured she was looking for you and that you were long gone. And, you know, I was okay with that. I figured I never would’ve gotten this far without you, and you, you have to look out for yourself.”

“You are verging dangerously close to being sentimental,” Peter told him. “You should probably stop now.”

“Well,” Stiles said, “thanks. I guess I hadn’t said that before. So thanks. For helping me. I just wish I knew why you were doing it.”

“Why are you trying to make it so complicated?” Peter asked. “Has it occurred to you that you were right the entire time? That I look at you and see myself of fifteen years ago? That I’m helping you because I feel sorry for you?”

“I guess,” Stiles said. He was quiet for a few minutes. “Are you happy, Peter?”

“What kind of a question is that?” Peter asked.

“A pretty simple one,” Stiles said. “You went through this. And you survived. So I guess I want to know . . . if it’s possible to be happy again.”

Peter thought about it. “I’m not _un_ happy,” he finally said.

“Do you ever have regrets?”

Peter gave a snort. “Who doesn’t?” he said, but then shook his head and answered the question that Stiles was really asking. “I don’t regret killing the people who killed my family. I’ve never regretted that. Even when I was lying on the ground waiting for Derek to cut my throat. I didn’t _want_ to die – obviously, I had made some arrangements to prevent it – but I wasn’t sorry for what I had done.”

Stiles nodded a little. “It just seems like – I don’t know what I’ll do. After this is done.”

“You keep walking. You keep breathing. One day at a time. You find something else to focus on. For me, it was becoming an alpha again. For you, it’s probably going to be protecting Beacon Hills. The pain doesn’t stop. It doesn’t go away. But you learn to live with it.”

There was another moment of quiet. “Thank you,” Stiles said.

Peter nodded and put the next episode on. They watched in silence until Stiles fell asleep.

 

~ ~ ~ ~

 

By evening the next day, Stiles was ready to go out of his mind with boredom. He had never been good at being cooped up over long periods of time, for any reason. And his opinion seemed to be that since his head did not hurt in this precise moment, he was obviously fine and should be allowed to get back to work.

Peter pacified him by agreeing that they could at least take him off ‘cognitive rest’ and get back to identifying the remaining coven members. It was easier than he thought it might be. In the aftermath of the first three murders, all of them had begun calling each other and were clearly trying to set up meetings and figure out what was going on.

All they had to do was look at the phone records of witches three and four, along with witch five, where Peter had dumped the third body, and look for common numbers. By sunset, they had eleven members of the coven identified. Stiles had mapped them and compiled what information was public. He had put their pictures on the walls and drawn red X’s through those they had killed, with great gusto.

“My guess is that the two we haven’t identified yet are the other two priestesses,” Peter said. “The lower-ranking members will talk amongst themselves and get in a tizzy about everything, but they won’t bother the head honchos. When the priestesses come down to deliver an edict about what they’re going to do, it won’t be over the telephone.”

Stiles agreed. “But if we can’t identify those two, eventually we’re going to have to find a way to make them come to us.”

“That won’t be difficult,” Peter said. “The hard part will be doing it in a way that gives us a home advantage. We’ll need to find a way to control the circumstances.”

They batted ideas around as Stiles did his physical therapy exercises, dressed in nothing more than his flannel pajama pants. He said he had a little bit of a headache, but the dizziness was gone. He had rested for almost thirty-six hours and Peter knew he wasn’t going to get anything better. He agreed that they could spend the next day scoping out the homes and businesses of the remaining coven members. If he was lucky, he would be able to keep Stiles in the car most of the time.

It was about eleven PM when Stiles fell asleep. Peter was up on his laptop until about one, feeling restless. He tossed and turned for a while before drifting into an uneasy doze.

How the witch got the door to their hotel room open without breaking it down, Peter never knew. But he woke almost instantly, hearing and smelling an unfamiliar presence in their room. It was faint, and he guessed she was using spells to cloak herself, but his alpha senses were honed by years of being in danger. He waited underneath the blankets, body tense, as she crept over to him, and grabbed her wrist as she swept the knife downward.

She screamed in rage, and Stiles jolted awake. Peter twisted the woman’s arm around her back and heard something break with a snap. She screamed again, this time in pain, and he flung her away from him. She looked around wildly and her gaze lit on Stiles, who was just managing to get out of bed. He reached for his baseball bat, and she made a wild gesture, flinging it away from him and out the open door of the hotel room.

Peter managed to grab her again, but she twisted and flung a handful of powder into his eyes. He reeled backwards, temporarily blinded. It wasn’t wolfsbane – that might have knocked him out entirely, and he was very familiar with its effects – but some kind of sand mixed with silver. It stung like a bitch but probably wouldn’t have any lasting repercussions.

Unless, of course, she managed to kill him while he was still trying to regain his balance. He felt the knife slide between his ribs with an impact that knocked the breath out of him. She had him up against the wall and twisted the blade back and forth. Peter grabbed her wrist and squeezed hard, but she didn’t let go.

He had just managed to get his vision clear when the woman reeled backwards. Stiles was behind her, and he had looped some kind of string around her neck and was pulling it taut. He was tall enough that he lifted her entirely off the ground, digging his knuckles in where he had twisted the garrote. She kicked and flailed but couldn’t get purchase.

Peter yanked the knife out of his side and dropped it to the ground, feeling the injury heal a few moments later. The woman was trying to get her elbow back into Stiles’ eyes or neck, and Peter had a feeling that the younger man’s leg wouldn’t support this kind of weight for very long. He grabbed the woman’s head in both hands and gave it a sharp twist. She went limp in Stiles’ grasp immediately, and he dropped her to the floor, gasping for breath.

“You all right?” Peter asked him.

Stiles nodded, though his teeth were gritted in what looked like pain. “Jesus. You?”

“Yeah.” Peter wiped a hand over his eyes and looked down at the woman, hitting the light on the desk. He realized that Stiles had been using the drawstring of his pajama pants to try to strangle her. Resourcefulness that Peter felt he could approve of. He grabbed a washcloth and wiped the blood off of his abdomen before it could drip onto the floor. They would have a few things to dispose of, but all in all, it was a rather neat scene.

“How did she find us?” Stiles finally asked.

“Most likely by using her brain,” Peter said. “She looked at their enemies, chose the most likely, looked at your past, figured out who you would go to for help, saw that I used my credit card to pay at this hotel, et cetera. We’re just lucky she didn’t bring friends. She must have wanted the glory for herself.”

Stiles nodded. He pushed both hands through his hair. As soon as he had lifted both arms, the tension holding his pants up let go, and they fell to his ankles. He looked down at them, then at Peter. His mouth fell open for a few seconds, and then he started to laugh.

The laughter was contagious. Peter found himself leaning against the wall, cracking up. It was the adrenaline, he knew that, but hell, it was _funny_. Stiles had just tried to strangle someone with his pants and now he was standing there in their hotel room, buck-ass nude, and both of them laughed until their sides hurt, until tears were streaming down Stiles’ face.

When the hysteria finally passed, Stiles straightened up and said, “I . . . I didn’t know I could still do that. Laugh, I mean.”

“I’m not sure I realized that about myself,” Peter said, for no reason that he could particularly decipher. Which was true. Annoying smirks, mocking chuckles, yes, but to _laugh_ like that, it hurt in ways that he couldn’t comprehend. It hurt in ways that felt good.

“We, uh . . .” Stiles said, and then Peter had him up against the wall and was kissing him. Stiles moaned into his mouth and didn’t fight back at all. If anything, he leaned into it, one hand threading in Peter’s hair, the ankle of his weak leg hooking around Peter’s calf so he didn’t have to use it to support his weight. They kissed until Stiles had to pull away and gasp for air, and even Peter felt like his lungs were starting to burn from the lack of oxygen. He leaned into the crook of Stiles’ neck to get more of his scent, which was surprised and excited and had all those faint underpinnings of pain and loss that Peter was so intimately familiar with. Stiles just groaned again as Peter started to nip and suck at the skin of his neck, canting his hips upward.

“Bet you didn’t know you could still do that, either,” Peter said, and Stiles looked down at his erection like it belonged to somebody else. Then he started to giggle again, sounding like he was edging back into hysteria. Peter didn’t mind. He kissed him again, one hand catching the underside of Stiles’ thigh and lifting it up for a better angle.

“Wait, wait.” Stiles pulled away, panting for breath. “Jesus. I’m not having sex with you while there’s a _dead body_ in our hotel room, Jesus fucking Christ.”

“I suppose that’s fair,” Peter said, although he was fairly sure that once the adrenaline and the hysteria had passed, Stiles was going to punch him in the face rather than kissing him again. But still. There were things they needed to do, and his libido would have to take a back seat for a while. “Let’s get to work.”

Stiles nodded and walked away, going into his things for a pair of underwear and pants. Once he was dressed, he picked up the red marker he had been using and looked at their wall of witches. He drew a red X over the face of the one that was dead on the floor. “Five down,” he said, capping the marker, “eight to go.”

 

~ ~ ~ ~


	6. Chapter 6

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> So, uh, have we all recovered enough from the end of 3B to be able to read this fic without sobbing like little girls? Maybe? I'll take a maybe.
> 
> This chapter is NSFW. Like... a lot. =D

 

They had their work cut out of for them. Without any way of knowing whether or not the witch had told others of her suspicions or even their location, they couldn’t stay in the hotel room. Plus they had a body to take care of. “Where do you want to leave her?” Stiles asked, as he started packing up their evidence wall. His movements were quick, but not rushed.

“I don’t want anyone finding this one,” Peter said, shaking his head. “The police here aren’t incompetent. If they tracked it back to this hotel room, we would find ourselves in hot water. We could just drop her in the dumpster, I suppose . . .”

“I bet she drove here.” Stiles fished in the body’s pockets and pulled out a set of car keys. Then he went over to his files and started flipping through. “She’s got a Ford Focus registered to her. See one of those out there?”

Peter glanced out the hotel room windows and nodded. “Red?” he asked.

“Yeah.”

“That’s hers, then. Excellent. We’ll dump her body in the trunk and drive it out to the middle of the woods, then leave it there. By the time anyone finds it, the body will have degraded to the point that they’ll have a tough time getting evidence from it.”

“Okay,” Stiles said, pulling a T-shirt on.

They packed everything up. Peter wrapped the body of the witch in the blanket they had taken from the third witch’s condo. He glanced outside, saw no one, and carried it down to her car along with her knife and the string of Stiles’ poor pants, which probably had DNA all over them. Stiles cleaned up Peter’s blood where it had dripped on the floor and they threw the towel in a plastic bag with the rest of their things.

The lobby was closed, and checking out of the hotel at three AM would look suspicious, so they just walked away from it. If the police weren’t there in the morning, Peter said, they could come back and check out like normal people. Until then, they would find somewhere else to sleep.

He drove the witch’s car and let Stiles drive his, although he wasn’t thrilled about the idea of the younger man driving with a concussion. Stiles swore that he was fit, no headache, no dizziness, nothing. But Peter took it slow. In any case, he didn’t want to get pulled over when he was driving someone else’s car with her body in the trunk. He could talk his way out of a lot, but not out of that. And he had a feeling that Stiles would be pretty pissed if he killed a Beacon Hills cop just for doing their job.

There was a dirt road that went through the preserve and out into the wilderness. At this time of year, there would be a lot of hikers, but not many campers, and most of the good trails were higher up in the mountains. As long as they stayed away from the popular jogging paths, nobody would find her for days. He parked as far off the road as he could, and then he and Stiles constructed a blind made out of branches and leaves. It was hard to do in the dark, but they did their best.

“Where are we going now?” Stiles asked, as Peter got behind the wheel of his own car.

“We need a place to sleep,” Peter said. “A few more hours, at least.”

Since at least one witch had figured out who Stiles was, and they had no idea what, if anything, she had told the others, Stiles’ apartment was out. Peter proposed going by Melissa McCall’s, but Stiles shot him down because he didn’t want her in danger. Peter headed to a motel on the outskirts of town. It was a small, non-chain budget place that had only two cars in the parking lot. The lobby was closed and it looked deserted.

He parked in the back so they wouldn’t be seen from the road, and headed for the second to last door in. The motel was so old and cheap that they didn’t even have electronic keys. Stiles picked the lock and let them into the room. Peter drew the curtains, and then pushed the entertainment stand, TV and all, in front of the door. That should keep them safe, at least for the night. They would have to do some thinking about how they were going to handle this from now on. He had two fake identities that he used for work, so they could probably get a room at an actual hotel, as long as they paid in cash and left his car out of sight.

Peter was fairly sure that Stiles was going to flop down on the bed and go to sleep, given how exhausted the younger man looked after their eventful evening. He was surprised when Stiles reached for him in the dark, wrapping an arm around his shoulders and pulling him in for a kiss. Surprised, but pleased. He returned the kiss with equal passion, hungry in a way that he hadn’t been for a long time.

There was a flurry of quick movements while he got Stiles out of his pants and Stiles pulled Peter’s shirt over his head and somehow in the middle of it, they wound up sprawled across the room’s single bed. Stiles gave a content little sigh as Peter’s mouth worked at his neck and his shoulder. His fingers dug into Peter’s back as he pulled himself up against the other man. Peter’s thigh slid right between his legs, easy as breathing, and Stiles moaned as he pressed himself into it.

Peter worked his way down Stiles’ chest with his tongue and his teeth, listening to the rise and fall of his breath, enjoying the little noises he made in the back of his throat. He nuzzled into the groove of his hip, breathing in his scent. “Hah,” Stiles said, letting his head fall back against the pillows. “Fuck.”

Peter mouthed at Stiles’ cock where it was trapped in his underwear, sucking at the tip of it through the fabric. Stiles made a very undignified noise, and his nails dug into the back of Peter’s neck, leaving marks that vanished a few moments later. Peter just laughed at him.

It was a rather dark and dirty secret of Peter’s that he really enjoyed giving blowjobs. He enjoyed the power he felt it gave him, enjoyed pinning someone against a mattress and sucking them until they begged for mercy. Sometimes he enjoyed granting it, and sometimes he enjoyed _not_ granting it. He liked seeing people he would consider strong – and he never slept with anyone he didn’t consider strong in some way – reduced in such a way.

He tugged at Stiles’ underwear, getting it down to his knees and then letting Stiles kick it the rest of the way off. Stiles whimpered desperately as Peter took him all the way in, slow and easy. He hooked his leg over Peter’s waist and tried to thrust upwards, but Peter just pushed him back down. He kept the pace slow, enjoyed the noise of Stiles’ rising pleas, keeping one hand tight around the base of his cock so he couldn’t come.

“Ah, God,” Stiles blurted out. “Please, come on, I need – I need to feel this, need to know I still _can_ , I need to – ” His words broke off into a choked shout as Peter’s hand around his cock loosened and he sucked hard, and Stiles’ whole body writhed in his grip as he came. Peter kept going down on him while he did it, swallowed it all, coaxing another shudder out of him before his body finally went limp.

Peter kissed his way back up, thinking of all the things he was going to do to Stiles now that they had gotten the desperation out of the way, thinking about fucking him while he lay on his stomach, hips canted up, thinking about fucking him while they were facing, with Stiles’ knees over his shoulders. Stiles’ eyes fluttered a little as Peter kissed him, his teeth tugging at Stiles’ lower lip. He let out a content sigh, and his breathing slowed and evened out.

“And, you’re asleep,” Peter said, with a snort. “Should’ve seen that one coming, Hale,” he muttered to himself. It _had_ been a long night.

There was no way he was going to sleep with a hard-on that wouldn’t be going anywhere if he didn’t do anything with it, so he watched Stiles breathe while he jerked himself off, his gaze trailing over the younger man’s naked body while he enjoyed thinking about what he might do to it later. Presuming that Stiles was still speaking to him in the morning. He thought that he probably still would be. After all, he had been the initiator this time. And it _had_ been one hell of a blowjob.

He cleaned himself up when he was done and lay down on the bed next to Stiles, getting the blankets over both of them, and surprised himself by falling asleep right away.

 

~ ~ ~ ~

 

There was no romantic cuddling the next morning. Peter awoke to Stiles pulling himself out of the bed. He blinked slowly as Stiles peered out the window as if to assure himself that they weren’t surrounded by police or witches, then headed towards the bathroom. A few minutes later, the water turned on. Peter looked at the clock and found that it was half past nine. A little early for his taste, but doable.

He got up and dressed. Stiles didn’t say anything about what had happened the night before, not even a ‘sorry I fell asleep on you’, which Peter frankly felt he deserved. Since Stiles wasn’t saying anything, Peter didn’t say anything either. He had learned early on that the quickest way to make casual sex awkward was to talk about it.

“I’ve been listening to the police scanner,” was how Stiles greeted him. “Nothing about the disappearance of our latest witch, or the hotel. It should be safe to go check out.”

“Okay,” Peter said. He told Stiles what he had been thinking about his fake identities and paying in cash. Stiles was in agreement, so they headed out. Since they had already packed up everything in their room, it was just a quick stop at the extended-stay hotel. Peter checked to make sure the room hadn’t been disturbed, which it hadn’t, and then returned their keys at the front office.

They were just starting to talk about their next move – Peter’s idea was breakfast – when Stiles’ phone rang. He looked down at it and said, “That’s Deputy Parrish’s number,” and he answered it without another word. “Hello? Hey, how’s it going?”

Peter could easily hear the other end of the conversation through Stiles’ phone, and the voice on the other end sounded uneasy. “Listen, Stiles, could you stop by the station for a bit? There’s a few questions we need to ask you.”

“’Bout what?” Stiles asked.

“These, uh. These murders. Sooner would be better. We sent someone by your place, but nobody was there.”

Stiles hesitated for just a moment as he considered his options. “Sure, yeah. I mean, I’ve been staying with Melissa. I’ll just need, like, twenty minutes to finish up with my physical therapy for the morning. Could you send someone to pick me up? I’m still not supposed to be driving.”

“Sure,” Parrish said, and there was a clear note of relief in his voice, that Stiles wasn’t trying to duck out of things. Peter turned the car down the road that would take them back to the McCall house. “We’ll see you in a half hour or so.”

“Okay,” Stiles said. He said his goodbyes and hung up. “Fuck.”

Peter agreed. “One of the coven has implicated you, somehow,” he said. “The question is how, and if they have any physical evidence. We’re going to need to get you an alibi.”

“That’ll be tricky, considering that I did actually commit the crime,” Stiles said. “You’re a little on the sketchy side, honestly.”

“Yeah. We’ll have to use Melissa.”

Stiles grimaced. “I don’t know that Melissa will – ”

“She will,” Peter said. “I spoke to her about it while you were at the emergency room the other day. She isn’t happy about what you’re doing, but she’s made the decision to support you. Call her, get her schedule for the past week. I don’t like it, but since most of the murders have taken place at night, I think she’ll probably be our best bet.”

Stiles nodded and sighed. “Will either of those fake identities hold up to scrutiny?”

“Casual scrutiny, yes. I’m aware that Peter Hale is a name I can’t use lightly around here.”

They were at the McCall house a few minutes later. Stiles had to lean heavily on his crutch as they went up the front walk. “It was a good idea to play up your injury like that,” Peter said, nodding approval. “The way the women have died so far, it would have taken great physical strength. Making yourself look weak was a smart choice.”

“Thanks,” Stiles said, shaking out his gigantic ring of keys and letting them inside. He was texting back and forth with Melissa as he went.

“You know, you keep saying that you’ve been living ‘with Melissa’ and calling this ‘the McCall house’,” Peter said, “but from my conversation with Melissa the other day, I gathered that she married your father?”

A faint smile touched Stiles’ face. “Yeah. A few years ago. Damn, Scott and I were disappointed. They finally get married just as we’re too old to have sleepovers. We always hoped they would do it when we were kids, and we could be actual brothers and live in the same house.”

“Then why is this still the McCall house? Did she not change her name?”

“She didn’t, actually,” Stiles said. “It was kind of a thing. Scott had always been surprised that she didn’t go back to her maiden name after she divorced his dad, right? But when he asked her about it, she said it was because it was his name, too. So after she and my dad were engaged, he found out about that, and he told her that she should only change her last name to Stilinski if she wanted to, that he promised he wouldn’t be offended or anything. So she kept McCall. I’m glad she did, now more than ever . . .”

“You talk about this house like your father didn’t live here. Did you stay at his own place even after they were married?”

“No, he lived here, though he actually kept the old house. The mortgage was paid, and that . . . that was the house where he and my mother lived together. I was going to buy it from him, once I had saved up enough money. I don’t think I could now, though.”

As it turned out, Melissa wasn’t working. She greeted Stiles with a hug and Peter with a nod and an offer of coffee. When she found out they hadn’t had breakfast yet, she got out some cereal for them. “I eat at the hospital a lot,” she said, somewhat apologetically. Stiles told her not to worry about it.

One of the police officers arrived about ten minutes later. Peter took care to remain out of sight while Stiles greeted him and then hobbled towards the cruiser with him. He chewed on his lower lip, irritated about not being able to accompany him. It was annoying to have to sit and wait for news.

“Do you know what happened?” Melissa asked him.

“Not for certain, not yet,” Peter said. “It seems that one of the coven was able to logically deduce Stiles’ identity. She told at least one of her sisters. Now, of the four murders that have taken place so far – four that they know about – one was in the victim’s home, two the bodies were dumped somewhere and they don’t know where the crime took place, and then the last was in the garage at the victim’s apartment building and we had to leave the body there.”

“Four that they know of?” Melissa asked, fidgeting.

Peter didn’t falter. “Yes, Stiles and I killed another last night after she found us at our hotel. We left her body in the woods; they won’t find her for a while.”

Melissa swallowed. “How many are there going to be?”

“Thirteen,” Peter said. “In any case, my guess is that one of the coven members is claiming to have been an eyewitness to the witch who was killed in the garage, and has identified Stiles as the perpetrator. Thus his need of an alibi.”

“Well, you know I was at work that day,” Melissa said. “I was literally working when you came in.”

“Yes, I know. And what I want you to say is that Stiles was doing his therapy down at the hospital and you were keeping half an eye on him when his leg gave out and he fell. There will be the hospital records to prove that he was there.”

“They’ll find the injuries pretty suspicious, given the givens,” Melissa said.

“Yes, they will,” Peter said, “and we’re basically banking on the fact that the police won’t _want_ to arrest Stiles, that even if they believe him guilty of these murders, they’ll assume he has a damn compelling reason. Police officers typically don’t approve of vigilantism, but Beacon Hills is by necessity an exception to the rule. And Stiles says a number of the police officers here are ‘in the know’, as it were. Therefore, all we have to do is give the police an excuse to say he’s not their man.”

Melissa considered this for a long minute, then nodded. “Then why are you so nervous?”

“Nervous isn’t the right word,” Peter said, “but I dislike being out of the loop.”

Melissa shook her head and almost smiled a little. “You and Stiles really are alike, you know that? He’s the same way. Give him bad news rather than no news at all. Waiting his probably his least favorite thing in the universe.”

Peter sighed and looked forward to a long hour or two of being psychoanalyzed. But instead, Melissa pulled out a deck of cards. They played rummy while they waited, mostly in silence. Melissa’s phone rang about forty minutes later. “Hello? Oh, yes, Detective Carnes, it’s good to . . . oh? Let’s see, Tuesday, that was my day shift . . . yeah, Stiles was down at the hospital doing his physical therapy. He had stopped by to bring me lunch. Then he fell and got a concussion, God, it was such a disaster . . . I suppose so. Sure. Yeah, just let me know what I can do to help. . . . oh, he . . . he’s doing okay, I mean, nothing has changed, which I suppose is a good thing . . . uh huh. You too. Bye now.”

She hung up and let out a breath, and they resumed their game. “It must have been tough on the department, losing the sheriff,” Peter said.

“Yes, it was,” Melissa replied.

Peter laid down a card. “I’m surprised Stiles hasn’t asked me about giving his father the Bite, to see if it would heal him.”

“Would it?” Melissa asked.

Peter didn’t look up from his cards. “It would stop any further deterioration, but recovery of his higher cognitive functions would be extremely unlikely. The brain is a delicate organ. If he had been bitten within a day or two of the injury, perhaps, but . . . the Bite heals wounds. Not scars.”

Melissa nodded. “And Stiles knows that. Which is why he hasn’t asked.” She played another card. “For the first month after he was back on his feet, all he did was research in books and talk to Deaton and scour the world for anything that could bring his father back. He was finally forced to admit that there was nothing. That there were some things that couldn’t be fixed. He had to let his father go . . . so he did.”

They played the rest of the game in silence.

Stiles got back to the McCall house about an hour later. The same deputy helped him up the front steps and Melissa let him in. Then she hugged him for a long time while Peter waited impatiently. “God, they treated me like I would break if they looked at me too hard,” Stiles said.

“Good,” Peter said, and Stiles nodded agreement. “What did you tell them?”

“All the stuff about how it wasn’t me. Then, off the record, I told Deputy Parrish the actual truth. I thought the first batch of murders had been sacrifices committed by a coven, and now someone who was probably related to one of the victims was out for revenge.”

“Nice,” Peter said. “Setting them on a wild goose chase without a single lie.”

“I feel a little bad about it, but,” Stiles said with a shrug, “desperate times call for desperate measures. I think in the long run it’s probably a good thing that the concussion forced me to lay low for a few days. Kept things from escalating further.”

“What’s going to happen to the witch who pointed the finger at you?” Melissa asked quietly.

Stiles shrugged. “Honest mistake. She saw someone who must have looked like me. Couldn’t have been me, because I was somewhere else, right? And I sure as hell don’t have the physical strength to kill someone like that. I wasn’t supposed to get her name, but I grabbed it while no one was looking. We’ll have to make sure she’s not next.”

“Agreed,” Peter said. “Let’s get moving. I still want to case some of our likely opportunities before the sun sets.”

 

~ ~ ~ ~

 

It turned into a long day. With eight coven members left and six identified, that was four houses and two apartments to go to. They looked at parking lots, street lights, security systems, fences. Stiles took some pictures and made some notes. All six of them had jobs, too, and there was always the possibility that it might be easier to get to one of them there, so that was six more places to go. Three office buildings, a salon, a jewelry store, and a restaurant.

All of the houses were empty, but it was only midday. They went to check out the work places instead, and discovered some promising empty parking lots but no witches. They stopped for dinner and to get a room at a new hotel. Peter used his fake identity and paid in cash. He didn’t specifically mention it, but let the clerk assume that he was alone. The room was a double anyway. From Peter’s extensive experience with hotels, he knew that they tended to have more double rooms than singles.

Stiles was edgy and not very talkative most of the day. Peter let him have his silence. Once the sun had set, they went back to check out the residences. The apartment buildings were hopeless, and the first two residences were dark and empty. But when they approached the third, there were lights on inside and multiple cars in the driveway.

“Let’s come around from the back,” Peter said. He parked two streets away and they walked the long way around, cutting through several backyards and approaching from the woods. It paid off. There were three women gathered in the backyard around a patio table. There was a fire burning, and several empty bottles of wine on the table.

“Witches, dead ahead,” Peter said, nodding his chin at the backyard. He glanced over at Stiles, who was absently rubbing his hands over his forearms as if he were cold. Peter could see the goosebumps that were raised there. The two of them crept closer, until they could see exactly what was going on in the backyard. The three women were all familiar from Stiles’ photograph wall, and speaking in raised voices. “They’re arguing,” Peter murmured for Stiles’ benefit, since the younger man didn’t have werewolf hearing.

“About?” Stiles asked. His voice was barely a whisper. He had clearly grown accustomed to the amount of volume he would need to be heard by a werewolf.

“Us, of course,” Peter replied smoothly. “Specifically, what they should do about us.”

“Not much of an argument to have,” Stiles said, “when they don’t actually have any options.”

“That blonde woman closest to the fire is the one who had the idea to have you arrested, and she seems bitterly disappointed that you wiggled out of it. Words like ‘police incompetence’ have been spoken,” Peter added. “Either way, there’s no point in staying here. We can’t take on three at once, so there’s no point in sticking around.”

“Nobody was at any of the other houses, though,” Stiles said. “They might split up.”

“They might,” Peter conceded, “but from the amount of wine they’ve clearly consumed, indicated by the empty bottles on the table, my guess is that they mean to stay together tonight, and possibly every night until we’re found.”

“Fuck,” Stiles muttered. “You don’t think we can take on three?”

“I think we could,” Peter said, “but it’s a risk I’m not eager to take unless it becomes necessary. If they stick together every night for a week, we’ll obviously have to consider it. But for now, all we know is that they’re hosting a slumber party. We’re not going to crash it.” He saw the frustrated look on Stiles’ face. “Patience,” he reminded him. “Patience is crucial to the vendetta.”

“Yeah.” Stiles let out a breath. “But still. Let’s hang out for a while. They might name drop one of the two priestesses, or say something else that might help us identify them.”

Peter agreed with that, and it seemed sensible enough. The witches clearly had no idea that they were there, so there wasn’t really any risk to hanging around. He could hear them clearly, and what they were talking about actually was fairly interesting. They had moved on to an argument about whether or not they should pursue more sacrificial victims while Stiles was on their tail. Two of them were in favor of it – “we need the power” – and one was against it because it was too risky.

“Amber wouldn’t agree,” she said, and that was a name that Peter didn’t recognize. He told Stiles, who wrote it down. It could have been one of the ‘spirit names’, but it was equally possible that it might be a real name. He didn’t remember the second witch giving them any spirit name that had amber in it, but he hadn’t bothered to note any of them down.

“Who gives a crap what Amber thinks?” the blonde woman asked. “She hasn’t even returned my calls.”

This was excellent news, Peter thought. As he had half-expected, the witches were fighting amongst themselves. It happened in packs, too; all but the most strongly bonded packs could splinter when faced with a threat. If there had been resentment or power struggles beforehand, a pack or coven would all but collapse when stressed.

Psychologically, Peter found that interesting. He had seen wolves who hated each other join forces and put aside their differences to fight a common enemy. But the slow, insidious poisoning that could take place inside an already established group seemed to prevent that from happening.

Stiles was fidgety and restless. Peter kept half an eye on him and occasionally told him what the witches were talking about, if he thought that it was important. He knew how difficult waiting could be, but they couldn’t afford Stiles moving around so much that he drew attention to them. He was clearly doing his best to keep quiet.

A little after midnight, the three witches put out the fire and went inside. Peter wanted to go get some sleep, but Stiles asked if they could swing by the other residences one last time, now that it was late, and see if anyone was home. Peter supposed it couldn’t hurt, but as he had suspected, they were empty. For the most part, the witches had gone to ground.

The new hotel was small and worn-down, though not actively dirty. Peter watched Stiles as they headed from the car into their room, wondering what, if anything, would happen now. They still hadn’t talked about the previous night, and Peter had to admit he was on the hornier side of normal. It was taking a lot of self-control not to simply grab Stiles and toss him down onto the bed.

“I’m going to take a shower,” Stiles said, kicking his shoes off. Peter looked at him in annoyance, but Stiles didn’t even glance in his direction. He only got more annoyed when Stiles tugged his shirt off and tossed it in the vague direction of his bag. He didn’t know if Stiles was trying to tease him, or if he was just that preoccupied with everything that had happened. Then Stiles stopped with his hand on the bathroom doorknob. “You gonna join me, or what?”

Peter grabbed him by the wrist with a smile that went from amused to predatory in the blink of an eye. He turned Stiles around and pushed him down onto the bed. Stiles hit the mattress with a slight ‘oomph,’ and Peter twisted slightly on the way down so he would wind up next to Stiles instead of landing his full weight on him. “That shower stall is tiny,” Peter said. “I think I’d rather have my way with you right here, right now.”

“I can work with that,” Stiles said. “Though I could probably use the shower first. I’m pretty gross.”

“I’ll soldier on somehow,” Peter said, hands already at work on Stiles’ belt. “But this time, you had better not go falling asleep on me.”

Stiles gave a slight grunt, flexing up into Peter’s hands, and gasped out, “Yeah, shit, sorry about that.”

Satisfied, Peter started stripping Stiles out of his pants. He made no objection when Stiles returned the favor, pushing his hands underneath Peter’s shirt and tugging it over his head. Stiles half-sat up, fixing his mouth on Peter’s collarbone, biting hard and then licking at the spot in apology. Peter growled, tangled his hand in Stiles’ hair, and yanked him up into a bruising kiss. Stiles just moaned into it, going loose and pliant in Peter’s grip.

Peter pinned him down to the bed and lined them up so their hips could grind against each other. He kept kissing Stiles, swallowing down the muffled noises that he tried to make. One of Stiles’ arms flung out to the side like he wasn’t sure what to do with it, then came around to get a handful of Peter’s ass and try to pull him even closer.

For several long minutes, there was nothing else in the world besides the heat and the friction between them, Peter’s teeth biting down on Stiles’ lower lip, Stiles’ hands digging into Peter’s shoulders as he rocked up against him. Then Stiles wrenched his mouth away and gasped out, “Fuck, fuck, I’m getting too close and I don’t wanna come until you fuck me.”

The matter-of-fact way he stated it, so unlike the teenager Peter remembered, who would have undoubtedly been stammering in embarrassment if he could speak at all, only turned Peter on more. He pulled back and started undoing his pants. “Roll over, then.”

“Fuck _yeah_ ,” Stiles said, but instead he scrambled for his discarded jeans. Peter let him, since he was still getting his pants off, and watched while Stiles fumbled for the pockets and pulled out a condom and a single-use packet of lube.

“Do you always carry that with you?” Peter asked, amused despite himself.

“No, I grabbed it from my stuff earlier today,” Stiles said, tossing it to Peter before stripping out of his underwear and getting back on the bed.

Peter held up the condom and said, “Werewolves can’t catch or carry diseases. STDs included.”

“Oh, really?” Stiles gave a shrug. “I probably shouldn’t take your word on that, but whatever.”

“I’ll wear it if you want,” Peter said. “I’m just not the biggest fan of them.”

“Me neither,” Stiles said. “Get down here, Jesus Christ.”

Peter laughed at him and finished getting out of his clothes. He watched Stiles watch him over his shoulder, his gaze raw and real and hungry. Then he leaned over him, one hand lingering on the small of Stiles’ back, bending down so his teeth grazed the nape of his neck. Stiles shivered. Peter reached around, letting both hands trail over the definition of Stiles’ chest and stomach before venturing lower. He enjoyed listening to Stiles’ breathe, while he struggled for control, hands knotting in the blankets.

This was good, Peter thought. He liked seeing Stiles like this, strung like a taut wire. It made him look alive. He licked his way down Stiles’ spine, easing his legs apart. Stiles groaned before Peter even touched him, groaned like he was dying. He leaned over so he could rest his forehead against the pillow, angling up as Peter pushed a finger inside him.

It had clearly been a while, Peter noted, which came as no surprise. He took things slowly, easing Stiles open, noting the ways that Stiles liked to be touched.

“This . . . this isn’t what I would have expected from you,” Stiles said breathlessly.

“Some things are worth doing right,” Peter replied absently, teeth grazing over Stiles’ ass and prompting a choked noise from the younger man. “It would be a shame for this to be over too quickly.”

“Oh, fuck you, I’m _dying_ here,” Stiles groaned, trying to push back harder against Peter as he added a third finger.

“Patience is a virtue,” Peter reminded him.

“You, you wouldn’t be saying that if it were _my_ fingers in _your_ ass,” Stiles panted, “which, oh shit, that sounds amazing, can we do that tomorrow?”

“I’ll think about it,” Peter replied, and bit down on Stiles’ ass again, harder, watching his fingers move in and out, smoothly now. Stiles whimpered, and that was enough to break Peter’s self-control. He braced himself against Stiles’ back and pushed himself in. He had to move slowly, watching Stiles’ fists flex in the blankets, which somehow turned him on even more. Once he was all the way inside, he stopped and let out a breath. “Good?”

“Oh, God, so good,” Stiles groaned. His arms were trembling, but he held himself perfectly still. He didn’t move even when Peter began to rotate his hips in tiny little thrusts, letting Peter have control over the pace. Peter settled into a rhythm that was hard and fast, both because that was how he liked it and because he was mindful that Stiles wasn’t going to last very long. Dragging it out to torture him would only result in a mediocre experience for both of them. Besides, he liked having Stiles squirming and sobbing beneath him. He liked the way Stiles stretched and arched and pushed back against him, desperate for more. He liked watching Stiles grip the sheets, liked hearing him moan and swear.

Stiles’ orgasm hit him sudden and without warning, and he went still for a moment, gasping into the pillow. Peter let him ride it out, waited until he had relaxed, all the tension going out of him, before he started to thrust again. Stiles moaned and tried to move against him, jerky and uncoordinated, still trying to recover. Peter grabbed his wrists and pinned him down, moving against him hard for another minute before he came.

In the silence that followed, he heard Stiles let out a wavering sigh, and then the younger man rolled onto his back and stretched. “Mm, fuck the shower,” he murmured, and closed his eyes. Peter shook his head at him and roused him long enough to do a basic clean-up.

Peter was sure that Stiles would go sleep in the other bed, but as soon as Peter had settled down, he crawled underneath the blankets with the older man. Peter thought about making some sort of sarcastic remark, but before he could come up with anything appropriate, Stiles was asleep. His face was turned away, leaving an attractive stretch of neck bared to Peter. Without thinking, Peter nuzzled his face into it, breathing in Stiles’ scent. Before much longer, he was asleep too.

 

~ ~ ~ ~


	7. Chapter 7

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Just kinda making some stuff up about Peter's life-before-the-fire here...
> 
> It's possibly worth mentioning that I pretend episode 3.08 (Visionary) never happened. Yep. I just.... don't see it.

 

They settled into a pattern. They slept late and didn’t talk about what happened in their hotel room while they were outside it. When they got up in the morning, they made a circuit of the residences and work places of the witches to see if they could catch any of them on their own. When they couldn’t, Stiles started making calls and doing things on his computer in an effort to track them down. He couldn’t _legally_ track their phones or credit cards, but Peter quickly learned that Stiles had picked up a few tricks over his tenure as the True Alpha’s Emissary.

If he got any leads, like a credit card being used at a hotel or a text message being sent from a strange location, they would try to track it down. They actually got in two skirmishes with members of the coven, but both times, Peter forced Stiles to pull back. Once because it was in too public a place, and once because two other witches showed up.

At night, they made the same rounds, and often found three or four of the witches together, staying the night at one residence. They quickly put together that the younger, less experienced members of the coven had banded together for protection and were making the rounds, staying at each other’s houses in group, never more than one night in the same place.

By the time that was over, Stiles was a ball of tense frustration, and when they got back to wherever they were staying that night, he practically attacked Peter. The sex was rough and enthusiastic and sometimes painful – at least for Stiles – and they never talked about it the next morning. Stiles was actually the kind of partner Peter preferred – vocal without being bossy, rough without being angry. Stiles was all hair-pulling and loud moans and nails that dug into Peter’s skin. He was also pleasantly bendy, something that Peter appreciated. He even let Stiles ride him once, after Stiles begged for it, something he hardly ever did. (“But if I don’t come, you have to suck me off,” Peter told him beforehand. He didn’t, and Stiles did, with great gusto. He wasn’t exactly a master, but he certainly wasn’t an amateur at it, either.) Peter had rarely had sex so good, but then again he hardly ever had sex with the same person more than once. One-night stands came without emotional attachment, and that was generally what he was in the market for.

It was _still_ what he was in the market for, and fortunately Stiles seemed to understand that.

“You know,” he said one night, staring at the ceiling after Peter had fucked him, “if you had asked me ten years ago which werewolf I would eventually end up sleeping with, I definitely wouldn’t have picked you. You would have been, like, ninth on my list.”

“I think I’m insulted,” Peter said, though really he was amused.

“I had the biggest crush on Derek,” Stiles said with a sigh.

“I know,” Peter said, still amused. “So did Derek. I’m fairly sure _everyone_ knew. It’s unfortunate for you that Derek, well.” He thought about how to phrase this. “I think he gave up on romance after what happened with Jennifer Blake. Which was probably all for the best, really.”

“Mm,” Stiles agreed. He rolled onto his side, pillowing the side of his face on one arm. “Hey. Can I ask you something? And you can tell me to shut up if you want, since I said I wouldn’t talk about it.”

“This ought to be good,” Peter said, and gestured.

“Why did you kill Laura?”

Peter thought about that question for a long time and decided to be honest. He had no reason not to be, and after years of defending his actions to anyone and everyone who could claim it was their business, he found it was a relief to tell someone who might actually understand, and not condemn him for his choices. “Because I hated her.”

“Why?”

“After the fire, Laura and Derek left Beacon Hills,” Peter said. “You knew that, didn’t you?” he added, and Stiles nodded. “They went to New York City. I can’t really blame Derek for it. He was only a teenager, and probably even more fucked up about the whole thing than I was. But Laura was an adult. She was an _alpha_. She was _my alpha_. And she left me here. She left me to rot in the hospital. Do you have any idea how easy it would have been for Kate Argent to walk into the long-term care ward and cut my throat? Hell, I’m still not sure why she didn’t.”

Stiles sat up, drawing one knee to his chest. “Maybe Laura was just scared.”

“Maybe she was,” Peter said, “but at the very least, she could have had me moved to a facility in New York. She could have checked me in somewhere under a false name. She could have done a lot of things besides leaving me to suffer alone.” He found the words spilling out of his mouth with bitter venom, despite his efforts to stem them. “She _left me_. I lost my family, too. But unlike Laura and Derek, I lost _all_ of it, because they left me alone.” He took a breath. “If I hadn’t _needed_ to kill Laura, I wouldn’t have. But I did. I needed the alpha power. So I killed her.”

“Okay.” Stiles nodded slowly. “I guess that sort of makes sense.”

“Sort of,” Peter said, and quirked an eyebrow at him. “Thanks for your ringing endorsement.”

Stiles didn’t dignify that with a response. “Why did you kill your nurse, then?”

“Believe it or not, I didn’t,” Peter said.

“Get out,” Stiles said. “She was in the trunk of your car.”

Peter gave a snort. “She was in the trunk of _her_ car, as a matter of fact. But I’m not lying. Julie had – well, it shouldn’t surprise you that she had a number of mental problems. Otherwise she never would have helped me. Yes, I manipulated her, but I never harmed her. One of her problems was that she had multiple drug addictions. A few nights after I left the hospital, I found her dead in her home. Overdosed. Accidentally or on purpose, I don’t know. She was upset, because I had told her I wasn’t going to bring her with me when I left town – which I planned to do after killing Kate, you know, before Derek tore out my throat.”

“And I set you on fire,” Stiles said proudly.

Peter leaned up and bit down on his ear, almost hard enough to draw blood. “In any case, I didn’t want to draw more attention to my nurse than was absolutely necessary, so I put her body in the trunk of her car and figured I would dump it somewhere later.”

“You sure as hell didn’t say that at the time.”

“There was no way you would have believed me, and frankly I didn’t give a damn what you thought.”

“I’m still not sure I believe you now,” Stiles said, and Peter arched his eyebrows. “I guess I do,” he finally said. “Mostly because I can’t conceive of any reason you have to lie. Unless you’re trying to make me like you. Are you trying to make me like you?”

“I have better ways to waste my time than that,” Peter scoffed.

“It was just a thought. You have been giving me pretty mind-blowing orgasms, and that’s a good first step in making someone like you.”

“Give and ye shall receive,” Peter said.

“Have I been blowing your mind? I’m impressed with myself.”

“With enough one-night-stands, one gets used to mediocrity,” Peter said, “and I have to admit, one thing that you never are is mediocre.”

“That’s me,” Stiles said, flopping backwards. “Thanks. You know, for being honest with me. And not biting my head off. Even if I’m not sure why you did it.”

“You keep trying to over-complicate it,” Peter said. “You remind me of myself, remember?”

“Oh my God,” Stiles said, and he’s actually laughing again. “You are such a complete narcissist. That’s why you actually like me. Because you like you, and I remind you of you. This is so profoundly messed up. Are you actually fucking me or is this some weird sort of masturba – ”

Peter had his mouth on Stiles’ before he could finish the question, stopping the words in their tracks. “If you have any doubt that I’ve been fucking you, I’ve been doing something very wrong,” he said, “so we should probably rectify the situation right now.”

“Oh, yeah, Peter, _rectify_ me – ” Stiles moaned, and Peter couldn’t decide whether he should burst out laughing or fuck Stiles speechless.

 

~ ~ ~ ~

 

They finally got a break the next night. When they got to one of the houses after dark, there were only two witches there. Peter was still on the fence about whether or not they should make a move, but then they realized why it was just the two of them. It was the same two from the first night, who had been advocated making more sacrifices to gain power, and it appeared that they had decided to go over everyone else’s head and perform the ritual themselves.

They were still in the backyard, and they still had a fire lit, but it was bigger now, almost a bonfire. Next to it, a pole had been erected, about ten feet high. A woman was fastened to it by a rope around her neck. Her hands were tied behind her back. She was completely naked, and close enough to the fire that her body was glistening with sweat. Occasionally she gave a strangled whimper, but every time she tried to struggle, the knot around her throat tightened.

“A three-fold death,” Stiles muttered. “They’re going to let her strangle herself trying to get free, and then move on to methods two and three.”

“Cruelty at its finest,” Peter agreed. He looked at Stiles and gave a little sigh. Crazy or not, revenge-driven or not, there was no way that Stiles was just going to sit and watch as an innocent woman was sacrificed. If Peter refused, he would charge in alone. Although that would simplify Peter’s life considerably, he found himself strangely reluctant to let it happen. “All right. How are we going to do this?”

Stiles looked around. “Well, I’ve got my shotgun,” he said.

“What’s in the shells?”

“Standard buckshot and dried mistletoe.”

They debated strategy for a few hurried minutes. Stiles clearly wasn’t going to wait very long, so Peter didn’t bother trying to get everything in perfect order. The two witches were low-ranked, weak in the coven. They could handle them, although they would probably get more than a nosebleed doing it.

Peter decided to wait in the wings so Stiles would receive the brunt of their attention and whatever defense they put up. Then he could swoop in for the kill if things got out of hand. Stiles emerged from the trees, lifted the shotgun, and pulled the trigger on both barrels.

It would have been better if he could have waited until the two women were standing together, but with one of them advancing on their sacrificial victim, there wasn’t any time to spare. The shotgun blast hit one of the women full on, and the other was caught in the periphery. The first witch went down hard, and Peter heard the frantic beating of her heart become erratic and then stop.

 Stiles wasted no time in readjusting his aim and pulling the trigger again. The second witch screamed in defiance and raised both hands. The air in front of her rippled, distorted, and the spray from the shotgun got caught in what looked like jelly. Then she gestured sharply at Stiles, and the shells flew back at him. Peter swore and moved in, hooking an ankle around Stiles’ weak leg to topple him to the ground and raising one arm to protect his throat and face in the same moment. The impact from the shells was weakened, tossed back at him by the witch, but it still stung like a bitch and knocked him backwards several paces.

The witch lifted both hands again, and the ground started to shake and come apart underneath Peter’s feet. Stiles rolled to get out of the worst of it, and Peter just gathered himself and jumped. He landed right on top of the witch and grabbed her by the hair, swinging her around and slamming her into and then through the glass sliding door that led into her house.

She tried to get up, pushing herself up onto her hands and knees, blood gushing from multiple wounds. But before she could get back to her feet, Stiles had the shotgun reloaded. He put the barrels at the back of her head and pulled the trigger.

The fight had left them out of breath, but Stiles wasted no time going over to the victim where she was still struggling to get free. “Easy, easy,” he said, pulling out a knife. “You’re just tightening the rope. It’s okay, I’ll get you out of there.”

Her eyes went a little wide and she whimpered when she saw the blade, but Stiles used it to cut the ropes that had her neck tied to the pole, then the ones around her wrists. She sucked in air and then began to cry. “Easy,” Stiles murmured again, lowering her to the ground. “You’re safe now. You’re okay.”

Peter watched this in silence, feeling somewhat impatient. Neighbors had surely called 911 when they heard the shots. Already his hearing could pick up sirens, although he gauged that Stiles wouldn’t be able to hear them for another minute. “We need to go.”

Stiles glanced at him and then nodded. He picked up the tablecloth from the little patio table and wrapped it around the woman’s shoulders. “You just sit tight, the police will be here in a minute, and they’ll get you to a hospital.”

“What – what were they?” the woman whispered.

“Witches,” Stiles said matter-of-factly. “We’ll hang out in the woods until they come get you, to make sure that you’re all right. Okay?”

She nodded. “What . . . what should I tell them?”

“That the two women kidnapped you and were probably going to do terrible things to you,” Stiles said. “You won’t need to elaborate; they’ll come to their own conclusions. Then two strange masked men came in with shotguns and saved your life, and for some reason you can’t remember any identifying factors about them at all. You never saw their faces and they never spoke to you.”

The woman looked up and a slight smile touched her face. “Okay, Stiles,” she said.

Stiles kissed her on the forehead, and then he allowed Peter to pull him into the forest. Peter was annoyed to see that Stiles intended to honor his promise to stay and make sure the police got the woman okay, but at least it wouldn’t take long. “I didn’t realize you knew her,” he said.

“I have no idea who she is, actually,” Stiles said, and shrugged. “A lot of people knew me, or Scott, that we didn’t really know ourselves. We were kind of a presence. You know?”

Peter nodded, because he did know. The police were in the backyard by then, and EMTs were coming over to help the woman. He saw her glance into the forest, but then Stiles was already heading back towards their car, far down the street. “Over halfway done,” he said. “Let’s go celebrate.”

 

~ ~ ~ ~

 

Stiles’ idea of celebrating was a lot of liquor, a lot of cheap Mexican food, and sex so enthusiastic that Peter actually started to worry that he might hurt himself. He had to remind Stiles twice to take it easy on his weak leg, and finally settled for using his werewolf strength to pin the younger man down and keep him from thrashing around.

After he had finally worn himself out – and worn Peter out, although the alpha would never have admitted it – he stared up at the ceiling and said, “I lied earlier. You’re _totally_ missing out on the whole gettin’ drunk thing. I’m totally wasted an’ it’s _awesome_.”

Peter just shook his head a little. “You’ll regret it in the morning.”

“Oh, yeah,” Stiles said cheerfully. He curled up on his side, pressing his face into Peter’s shoulder.

“Stop trying to cuddle,” Peter told him.

“Why?” Stiles asked. “I’m a cuddly drunk. Everyone’s always said so. Anyway there’s nothing wrong with cuddling. You’d probably be a happier person if you let me cuddle you.”

“Oh, really,” Peter said. “Your logic is flawed.”

“Nope,” Stiles said. “Touch from another human causes the body to release oxytocin. An’ oxytocin helps decrease fear and anxiety, and also just makes you a happier person in general. Plus it like helps you heal wounds and reduces inflammation an’ stuff.”

Amused, Peter said, “I’m sorry, I didn’t realize I had wandered into a lecture on biology.”

“Neuroanatomy,” Stiles said, nestling closer. “I took some bio courses in school and stuff. But I had to drop out before I graduated. Too much was going on. But when I needed a job, it came in handy. I mean, I still wanted to be a cop. But when was I going to have the time to go through the police academy? I figured, I was out there protecting people and solving mysteries every day anyway, so did I really need a badge? Nope. So I just thought about sort of day job might work out and earn me some money without stressing me out.”

“And?” Peter asked.

“Massage therapy,” Stiles said.

“You’re kidding,” Peter said.

“Nope. I give a killer massage. Gimme one of those amazing blowjobs tomorrow and I’ll prove it to you. Had to quit, though. Couldn’t stand up long enough. Probably could’ve kept doing hand massages and stuff, but I was too preoccupied.”

“Not surprising.”

“What about you?” Stiles asked. “I kept track of you, you know. I know that you’re a ‘consultant’ for major law firms. I just don’t know what the hell that means. Unless you’re actually a hit man, which wouldn’t surprise me even a little.”

“I am, sometimes,” Peter said, “but that’s actually fairly rare. It was more usually intimidation, delivering bribes, blackmail. Obtaining illegal items, or disposing of evidence in a way that can’t be traced.”

“Sounds right up your ally.”

“Yes,” Peter said, without modesty, “I’m very good at it, and I enjoy it as a general rule.”

“You’re a terrible person,” Stiles said, his voice not at all judgmental. “Were you always like that?”

“What kind of a question is that?” Peter said, amused despite himself.

Stiles shrugged. “A good one. I’m just curious. I mean, what were you like before the fire? Is that the sort of work you did then?”

“No,” Peter said, glancing over at him and wondering why he was answering any of these questions. Well, Stiles probably wouldn’t remember any of it in the morning. “I was an actual lawyer back then.”

“Civil or criminal?”

“Criminal.”

“Prosecutor or defense?”

“Defense.”

“You were a slimy defense attorney!” Stiles laughed and rolled onto his back. “Of course you were. I can so see that.”

Peter reached out and flicked at Stiles’ nose. “And I was extremely good at it, thank you very much. So you can keep your opinions to yourself. But to answer your real question, was I always a devious, manipulative son-of-a-bitch? Yes. Ever since I was a kid. When I was four, I broke my favorite toy and then lied and told my father that Talia had broken it and got her in trouble. I sold answers to exams, got another kid who hit on my girlfriend expelled by planting marijuana in his locker, and blackmailed a teacher into giving me an A in history without having done any work because I found out she was having an affair with a student. I’m just an asshole born and bred.”

“Awesome,” Stiles said. “I like that. I mean, seriously. That you don’t have delusions. Scott always thought that I’m a better person than I really am.” He sobered up slightly, pressing his face against Peter’s arm again. “Like . . . what Melissa said. Scott wouldn’t want me to do this. But if Scott had really understood me at all, he would have known damn well that I would do this.”

“Of course Scott _knew_ ,” Peter said, scoffing. “That doesn’t change the fact that he wouldn’t have wanted you to. Talia wouldn’t have wanted me to go on a vendetta, but she would have known damned well that I would do it.”

“I guess,” Stiles said. “Am I a bad person?”

“You are an amoral person,” Peter told him. “Or at the very least, you possess a very different set of morals from the average person. Which is fine, I think. You live in a very different world. Is what you’re doing wrong? Well, a jury of your peers would certainly say so. But a jury of your peers would have no idea what it’s like to lose your pack.”

“I know that my dad wouldn’t like it.” Stiles had turned weepy and melodramatic. Slow tears were dripping down his cheeks. “Like your sister. He wouldn’t be surprised, but he wouldn’t like it.”

Peter liked drunk Stiles better when he was cuddly and giggly. He rolled onto his side and thumbed the tears off Stiles’ cheeks. “No, he wouldn’t,” he said, “but I think if you had been killed and he had survived, he would be doing the exact same thing, do you know that?”

Stiles’ eyes went a little wide, but then his expression turned thoughtful. “Yeah,” he finally said. “Maybe he would.”

“If nothing else, know that there is at least one other person in this hotel room who would be doing the exact same thing in your shoes,” Peter said, and then rolled his eyes when Stiles looked around as if to seek this person out. “Me, you idiot.”

“Oh, right.” Stiles laughed shakily. “Sorry. I think I’m a little drunk.”

“You don’t say,” Peter replied.

“So why’d you stop . . . lawyering?” Stiles asked, visibly pulling himself together and then reaching for the bottle of whiskey. “I mean, obviously, the fire, and then werewolf bullshit, but you moved out of Beacon Hills years ago. Why didn’t you go back to it?”

Peter was quiet for a minute. “Talia was a lawyer, did you know that?” he asked, and Stiles shook his head. “She was a prosecutor. She used to give me an endless hard time about being a slimy defense attorney, as you graciously put it. We used to compare notes on cases, after they were over. Share war stories. After the fire . . . every time I set foot in a courtroom, it reminded me of her.”

Stiles looked up at him, gaze solemn and strangely childlike in the dim light. “Did you love your sister?” he asked.

“Yes,” Peter said. “Very much.”

“It always seemed kind of strange,” Stiles said. “You getting revenge for your family, when . . . you didn’t seem to care about them that much. I never knew what to make of it, really.”

Peter said nothing.

“Okay, I’ll shut up,” Stiles said, mouthing wetly at Peter’s chin. Peter pushed his face away. “What, oh my God, you’re mad at me. I wasn’t supposed to talk about your family, I’m sorry. Don’t be mad. I’m not good at angry sex.”

“You’re an idiot,” Peter told him.

“Yeah,” Stiles agreed. “I guess some things never change, right?”

“I miss her,” Peter said, his voice abrupt and angry. He thought maybe he had had a little too much to drink himself. Werewolves _could_ get drunk, if they were determined enough. Or maybe it was just Stiles. “And I hate you for making me remember that.”

Stiles went abruptly still and silent. Then he asked in a small voice, “Does it ever get better?”

“No,” Peter bit out. “It never gets better and it never goes away. Losing someone – to illness or accident – you can move on from that, you can put it to rest. But this – having someone taken from you – that never stops hurting. There will never be a day when you don’t wake up with it.”

“Okay,” Stiles said. “Good. I don’t – I don’t want to ever forget.” He curled inward, resting his forehead against Peter’s upper arm. “I’m not stupid, you know. I knew that there was no turning back from this. It’ll be a miracle if I survive this or if I don’t get arrested. But I want – I want to be able to look back on it every day and never wonder why I did it. I never want to forget my friends.”

Peter looked at him in surprise. He had intended the words to hurt Stiles, to drive home the loss he had experienced. He hadn’t expected Stiles to take comfort in them. “I suppose that’s . . . one way of looking at it.”

“Would you rather forget your sister?” Stiles asked.

Peter thought about it. “No,” he finally said. “I suppose I wouldn’t.”

“Okay then,” Stiles said, and Peter sort of wanted to scream at him, because nothing was okay. He found that he just didn’t have the energy. “Think I’m just . . . gonna get some sleep.” Stiles snuggled close again, pressing himself against Peter’s side. Peter sighed, gave up on trying to relocate them, and dragged a blanket over them. “I like listening to your heart beat,” Stiles murmured, and before Peter could ask him what he meant by _that_ maudlin little statement, Stiles was asleep.

 

~ ~ ~ ~


	8. Chapter 8

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> This chapter carries both a tissue alert and a made-up-backstory-for-Peter alert. <3

 

The two witches they had killed were part of the trio that had been moving between houses, so with them dead, the third was the obvious choice for their next target. But Peter hesitated. “I think we can use her to find Amber,” he said, “presuming that she’s one of the remaining priestesses. She seemed closer to her than the other two. With them dead, and her alone, she may seek asylum with Amber.”

“Presuming she actually knows where to find her,” Stiles said. “The two that we’ve tortured so far haven’t seemed to know anything at all about the priestesses. Or at least they haven’t been able to tell us anything. There may be some sort of binding or compulsion on them, that prevents them from revealing anything.”

“True,” Peter said, “but I think it’s worth a try.” He shuffled through their notes. Seven down, six to go. Two priestesses. Even leaving out the witch that they were talking about, that still left them three targets. “Let’s stake her out tonight and see where she goes.”

Stiles agreed. The witch lived in a one-story house on the south side of town. Peter parked down the street. It was only midafternoon, so they would be there for a while. He had his phone and his e-reader. Stiles had his laptop. He was playing some retro video game on it and drinking Mountain Dew.

Minutes dragged on and turned into hours. Peter amused himself for a while, then got bored and started rubbing at Stiles’ knee. “Quit it,” Stiles said absently, shoving his hand away. Peter just laughed at him and slid his hand up Stiles’ inner thigh. Stiles looked over at him and said, “God, you’re such a toddler. Has anyone ever told you that?”

“I do have an overly developed interest in instant gratification,” Peter agreed, undoing Stiles pants.

“Fuck, are you gonna blow me right here?” Stiles asked, his tone more excited than displeased. “That’s so hot. You are such a pervert, though, I can’t believe I went all these years without knowing that.”

“Would that have changed anything?” Peter asked, drawing Stiles’ cock out of his pants and stroking it slowly.

“Nnngh, maybe.” Stiles tilted his head back so it rested against the seat. “You have _no idea_ how horny I was when I was seventeen; it’s fully possible that I might have started hitting on you just to see what you would do.”

“This, probably,” Peter said, leaning down and taking Stiles’ into his mouth. He enjoyed hearing his rising gasps, enjoyed the way Stiles’ hand curled into his hair, holding on without pulling him down. It was such a bad idea, but there had been a time in his life that he had loved having bad ideas, taking risks and doing stupid things. It had been a long time ago, but there was still a part of him that remembered.

Given their circumstances, he decided not to draw things out. If they got caught, it would ruin their entire day’s worth of surveillance. So he made it quick, and Stiles had no problem obliging. He fell asleep for a little while afterwards, and Peter tucked him in and zipped him up, amused by the process. The sun began to set, and he shook Stiles awake as a car pulled into the witch’s driveway.

“You take the front, I’ll take the back,” Peter said, sliding out of the car. Stiles nodded and stayed where he was. “Text me if she comes out.”

He went back behind the house and crouched down in some bushes, and waited, and waited, and waited. There were lights on in the house. He could hear music playing, surprisingly loud, country music. He could also smell food, spaghetti sauce, he thought.

An hour passed. The smell of food faded, but still the witch didn’t emerge, so it didn’t look like she had just been preparing herself a quick dinner before she left. Peter pulled out his phone and texted Stiles. ‘She isn’t going to Amber. Let’s go in.’

Stiles agreed, and bare moments later, he had joined Peter behind the house. Peter pointed to the wooden fence around the property, then knelt down so Stiles could climb onto his back. Stiles grimaced, but he obviously wasn’t going to be able to climb it on his own, so he let Peter carry him piggy-back.

As soon as Peter’s feet touched the ground on the woman’s property, Stiles hissed and let out a curse. “Fuck, protective magic,” he said. “Should’ve seen it on the fence, but it’s subtle. She’s good. Not strong per se, but skilled.”

Peter nodded. “Then she knows we’re here.”

“Of course I do!” the witch proclaimed from her back porch. “After you killed Lynda and Crystal, it was obvious that you’d be coming for me. Did you think I was just going to stand here and die?”

“And we thoughtfully gave you a full hour to prepare while you blasted loud music to keep me from hearing what you were doing,” Peter said with a sigh. “Well, you win some, you lose some, I suppose.”

“And you’ve won too many,” the witch said. Peter wanted to laugh at the melodrama of it all, but he was a little more concerned with the imperious finger she was pointing at them, at the mass of dark energy that was massing between them and her. Less than three seconds later, it had coalesced into the form of a bear, easily three times as big as the biggest alpha he had ever seen.

“Holy _shit_ ,” Stiles squeaked, and the witch laughed, a high-pitched cackle that would have done any Disney villain proud. Stiles dove to one side and rolled as the bear swiped at him with a gigantic paw. It uprooted an entire tree as it swung around to face Peter.

“No thank you,” Peter agreed, diving in the other direction.

The logical thing to do in this sort of situation was to merely dodge the construct’s attacks and go after the witch herself. Once she was dead, the power she was supplying it would be cut off and it would dissolve. That was a lot easier said than done. Every time Peter thought he might be able to get close to her, the bear lunged at him. He was forced back two, three, four times.

Retreat seemed like another lovely option in Peter’s mind, but he had no doubt that the bear would merely pursue them. Their luck with it wouldn’t get any better. So he kept feinting and dodging, looking for his chance. He was just starting to wonder where Stiles had run off to when the younger man let out a battle cry that would have done any wolf proud and launched himself out of the tree he had climbed. He landed on the bear’s back and plunged a knife down into it. The bear let out an ear-shattering roar and went to its hind legs, trying to shake Stiles off. Stiles hung on gamely, and Peter knew from experience now that the younger man had upper body strength that was nothing to be sneezed at. He saw a flash of silver and Stiles thrust another knife into the bear’s neck, holding on for all he was worth.

The witch screamed in defiance and took a step forward. She raised her hand and the body of the bear began to contort and ripple, changing into a snake, long and sinuous. Under normal circumstances, that would have bothered Peter, but here it gave him an opportunity. The witch was completely focused on her spell, and in that moment, vulnerable. He dove at her, jaws closing down on her neck just as the creature’s transformation was complete. She tried to scream again, but it came out as a gurgle as they hit the ground.

The monstrous creature shuddered once. Stiles finally lost his grip and fell. He let out a yelp and started trying to scramble to his feet as the bulk of it headed towards the ground. Just before it hit, it began to dissolve, covering Stiles in black goo. “Oh, gross,” Stiles complained, although he seemed happy enough not to have been crushed. “What the hell.”

Peter left the body of the witch and went to help him up. “You all right?” he asked.

“Aside from being covered in tar that smells like rotten fish, yeah, I’m fine,” Stiles said. “Little out of breath, that’s all.”

“It _is_ disgusting,” Peter said, giving him a critical look. He reached up and tried to wipe some of it off Stiles’ cheek. It clung stubbornly to his hand, warm and viscous. “We’ll need to get you cleaned up. I don’t think the hotel will have what we need.”

Stiles nodded a little. “Wonder what the cops will make of it,” he said, going over to the woman’s house and drawing a spiral on the back door with the black goo on his hands. It was an excellent question, but Peter didn’t particularly care about the answer. He looked over the scene quickly and decided that they didn’t really need to clean up much. The woman’s body looked like it had been mauled by an animal. Even if they connected it to the other murders because of the spiral, they would have a hard time saying a human had done it.

Since Stiles didn’t say anything else, Peter decided on his own that they were going to the McCall house. He didn’t want his car seen there, so he parked down the street and they made their way through several other yards to get to the back door. There were lights on inside, so Peter knocked.

A few minutes later, the curtains on the back door moved slightly, and Peter saw Melissa’s dark eyes looking out at them. She opened the door just a crack. “Stiles?” she said, and he nodded a little at her. “What’s the airspeed velocity of an unladen swallow?”

“African or European?” Stiles responded.

Melissa’s mouth creased into a tiny smile. She undid the chain and let them in. Once they were inside, in the light, she said, “Good grief, what happened to you?”

“The witch conjured up some sort of monster,” Peter told her. “I thought I would bring him back here to get him cleaned up.”

“What is that stuff?” Melissa asked, wrinkling her nose.

“Ectoplasm,” Peter said.

Melissa blinked. “Seriously? Did I step onto the set of Ghostbusters?”

“Ectoplasm,” Stiles murmured. “From the Greek. Ektos, meaning ‘outside’, and plasma, meaning ‘something formed or molded’.”

“What he said,” Peter said. “Any sort of conjured monster, once it’s killed, will dissolve back into ectoplasm. Stiles had the misfortune of being right next to this one when it did. And the best clean-up method is warm water, white vinegar, dish soap, and if you should happen to have any, turpentine.”

“I can’t imagine why you know that,” Melissa said, shaking her head. “I don’t know if we have any turpentine. I’ll look. Stiles, for Heaven’s sakes, take off those clothes so we can burn them.”

Stiles nodded and began to strip out of his clothes. Peter shepherded him up to the bathroom and turned on the hot water. It wasn’t as bad as it could be. He was basically fine from the waist down. Some of it had gotten down the collar of his shirt, so it was on his neck and shoulders, as well as being all over his arms and of course his head.

Peter gingerly pushed a hand through Stiles’ hair. The ectoplasm had mostly dried, leaving his hair stiff and clumpy. “How attached are you to your current hairstyle?” he asked, and Stiles just shrugged. “Figured,” Peter said, since he expected Stiles just hadn’t bothered getting it cut in the last six months. “Good, because I think if we had to try to get this all out, we’d be here all night.” He went looking through the bathroom things and found a pair of scissors.

He was still chopping at Stiles’ hair when Melissa came in. She was carrying a bucket, plus the bottle of vinegar and the dish soap that Peter had asked for. “I found a little bottle of turpentine in Josie’s art things,” she said, and saw Peter’s blank look. “Pack member who joined after you left town,” she clarified, waving this aside. “There’s not a lot of it.” Then she saw the scissors and frowned. “You’re going to ruin those.”

“Most likely,” Peter said, snipping away.

Melissa huffed out a breath and looked at where Stiles was sitting on the closed toilet, completely naked. “Stiles, would you rather I . . .?”

“No,” he said. “I’m okay. Peter will take care of me.”

Melissa’s eyes narrowed. She looked between the two of them like she had just figured something out, and didn’t much care for it. But she nodded and said, “Okay. I’ll be downstairs if you need me.”

 She left the bathroom and shut the door. Peter shook his head a little, amused despite the fact that he was fairly sure Melissa was thinking about poisoning him. He got a washcloth and soaked it with the turpentine. “Clean up your face as best you can,” he said, and stuck the bucket under the faucet to collect some hot water. He mixed in the vinegar and dish soap, then had Stiles sit in the tub.

“How do you know this, anyway?” Stiles asked.

“I read,” Peter said. “You never know what might come in handy.”

Stiles gave a snort. “Story of your life. I can remember the many times you just _happened_ to have information that was convenient for us. Or, more likely, convenient for you. How old were you when you found that spell to raise yourself from the dead?”

“Nineteen,” Peter said, scrubbing at Stiles’ shoulders.

“Did you ever think you’d have to use it?”

“No,” Peter said. “The circumstances were so specific. It had to be done by the same alpha that had killed me, for one thing. That alone made it fairly unlikely. And it would only work if I was an alpha at the time of my death, which I’ll remind you that I wasn’t at nineteen.”

“Bet you figured you would be,” Stiles said.

Peter’s hands stilled for a few moments. “No,” he said. “Not back then. Talia was my alpha. I never sought to supplant her. Talia was . . . remarkable. I didn’t just care about her; I _respected_ her. And I don’t think I need to tell you that I don’t respect many people.” He rinsed the washcloth out, then dipped it back into the soapy mixture. “Once she was dead and Laura left, it was clear that I would have to become an alpha. You know, the Hale family held this territory for centuries.”

“Why did you leave?” Stiles asked, glancing over at him. “I mean, you never seriously tried to get Scott to fuck off, or to kill him, either.”

“It wasn’t worth it,” Peter said. “Family claim matters a lot less when you’re the only one left. And believe it or not, I had no particular desire to tangle with Scott and his pack. He always seemed to come out on top, somehow.”

“Until now,” Stiles said, his voice hollow.

“Mm,” Peter said. “We can’t win them all, I suppose. Rinse.”

Stiles turned the water to the shower spray for a few moments and ducked underneath it. His back and shoulders were mostly clean. He started at work on his arms while Peter washed his hair. “Do you think Talia would want you to come be the alpha of Beacon Hills again? To try to reclaim the family territory?”

“An interesting question,” Peter said. “She might. Tradition and family were very important to her. But at the same time, she had no delusions about what I was. Being an alpha in Los Angeles, nobody pays me any mind. Being the alpha _here_ . . . would put me in a great deal of danger. And I’m not so much of a fan of danger.”

“Why not?” Stiles asked. Peter arched an eyebrow at him. “I’m serious. You said it yourself. We can’t win them all. We’re all mortal. We’re all going to die someday. What does it matter if it’s sooner rather than later?”

“This conversation is turning very morbid,” Peter said.

“My entire pack is dead, what do you want from me?”

“I don’t want to die,” Peter said. “Do you?”

“I don’t know,” Stiles admitted. “Some days I do. A _lot_ of days, if we’re going to be honest. When I wake up and the pain is so bad I could cry. When I find myself turning to say something to Scott and I realize he isn’t there. When I come up with some problem and I want to ask my dad and then remember that I can’t. Sometimes I want to die _so_ bad. But then sometimes I remember that I wanted to live so much that I crawled all the way to the Nemeton that night . . . and I don’t think that was just so I could get revenge.”

Peter was quiet as he continued to scrub his fingers through Stiles’ hair. “Then do you want to live?”

“Yes,” Stiles said, and he started to cry, just quiet, hitching little sobs. “Sometimes I hate myself for that. For wanting to live even though the others are gone. But I can still laugh. I can still feel something besides pain. I didn’t know I would ever be able to again, but I can. I can still enjoy eating cheap tacos and drinking whiskey. I didn’t want this. But it won’t stop. Life just keeps going and taking me with it.”

Peter leaned over and pressed a kiss against Stiles’ temple. He instantly regretted it, because Stiles was still covered in vinegar and turpentine, but he kept his movements surreptitious as he wiped his mouth. “That’s the way life is,” he said, “and you know, if there’s no other comfort for you, I’m sure that Scott and the others would be happy to see that you’re still alive, and that you’re still able to feel.”

“That’s awfully maudlin, coming from you,” Stiles said, and wiped the back of his eyes. “Do you feel that way about Talia?”

“I suppose so,” Peter said. “Rinse,” he added, and Stiles got up to rinse his hair out. It was still clumpy and black, but getting better. He sat back down and Peter started on another scrub. “Did you know,” he said, before he could think better of the idea, “that I actually had a lover at the time of the fire?”

Stiles looked up at him, surprised. “Really?”

“Your shock is kind of an insult,” Peter said, and gave a snort of laughter. “But yes. To be honest, we probably would have been married, if it hadn’t been illegal back then. The pack didn’t care, they accepted it. I had just asked him to move in about two months before the fire, and that’s why he was there that night.”

Stiles was quiet for a minute. “What was his name?”

“Brandon,” Peter said, and the word brought the usual stab of pain to his gut.

“How did you meet him, then?”

“As part of a trial,” Peter said. “He was a key witness for the defense. I had to go over his testimony with him several times. He was intelligent, sharp, a complete cynic, and yet capable of turning on this sort of charm that worked magic on a jury. I knew it would be bad form if anyone found out that the defense attorney was sleeping with one of the defense witnesses, so I managed to restrain myself until after the trial was over – I won, of course – and then asked him out for a celebratory drink. And one thing led to another.”

“That makes it sound like it was a normal romance,” Stiles said.

“You know,” Peter said, “Brandon was the most normal thing I ever had in my life. He knew about the supernatural, knew what I was – his mother was a Druid – but the day-to-day, the way we built a life together – that was normal.”

“It’s so hard to picture that,” Stiles said.

Peter shrugged. “Look back on your life five years ago, try to picture yourself juggling college classes, trying to find a girlfriend, getting annoyed at the barista for getting your coffee order wrong. Is that any easier to picture?”

“No,” Stiles admitted.

“And yet, you lived it,” Peter said. “Brandon and Talia were the only two people in the entire world that I respected. And then they were taken away from me. I know there were others killed in that fire, but _they_ were who I was getting revenge for. For them . . . and for myself. Because I knew that I would never be able to go back to the way I was.”

“I know you miss them,” Stiles said. “Do you ever miss you?”

Peter’s hands went still in the younger man’s hair. “I guess I had never thought about it quite that way,” he said. “Rinse. I think that’s the last of it.”

“Okay. Too bad, that actually feels really good. Scalp massage.” Stiles turned the shower back on and scrubbed out his hair. He did one last wash with regular shampoo and conditioner, then got out of the tub. He grimaced at the lopsided haircut. “I’ve got a razor back at my place; I’ll fix it tomorrow. Man, I haven’t had a buzzcut in forever. That will evoke some serious nostalgia.”

Peter nodded and didn’t offer an opinion on Stiles’ hair. “It’s late. Do you think Melissa would mind if we slept here?”

“Melissa’s been trying to get me to sleep here since we got back into town. No shenanigans, though. That would just be awkward. I’ll go let her know that we’re staying. I’ve got some spare clothes here.” Stiles toweled off quickly and left the bathroom. Peter cleaned up, then poked his head out into the hallway to hear the conversation. “Hey, thanks for letting me use the shower. We’re just going to crash here if that’s okay.”

“Of course it’s okay,” Melissa said. “I work early tomorrow, so I might be gone by the time that you get up. Just lock up behind you.”

“Uh huh,” Stiles said. “Thanks. We’ll just – sleep in the guest room.”

“Okay,” Melissa said softly, with a note of pain in her voice that told Peter the other option was Scott’s old bedroom. Then she said, “About Peter.”

“Yeah? I can’t make him go, I mean, it wouldn’t be fair. He’s really helped me, and – ”

“That’s not what I was going to say,” Melissa said. There was a moment of awkward hesitation, and then Melissa said, “I’m glad he’s helping you. You look . . . ectoplasm aside, you look better tonight than you have in weeks. And I don’t think that’s just because half the witches are dead. I’m not going to say I _understand_ this thing you have with Peter, but . . . I guess I can see how you would feel a kinship towards him. Just . . . be careful, okay? I don’t want him to hurt you.”

“Okay,” Stiles said. “I’ll be careful.”

He came back up the stairs a few minutes later. Peter had located the guest room, easily distinguished by its scent, or lack thereof. Stiles walked in, obviously expecting him to already be there. “I’m beat,” he said, and crawled under the blankets. Peter joined him, and Stiles curled up next to him, one hand loosely grasping at the hem of Peter’s shirt. Stiles was asleep bare moments later, but Peter stared at the ceiling. He was awake for a long time.

 

~ ~ ~ ~


	9. Chapter 9

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I don't know if Deputy Parrish ever got a first name in the canon. So uh... sorry if he did, let me know. ^_^ I originally had an OC in this role but then I kept seeing these gifs of Parrish and he looked awesome, so, ta da! Parrish!

As predicted, Melissa was gone by the time they woke up the next morning. Peter decided they had better lay low for a little while. They had killed three witches in two days, and the coven knew who they were. Stiles was loath to slow down when they were so close to the end. Only five left, he kept saying, and Peter reminded him repeatedly that at least two of them would be the hardest.

They finally compromised. Stiles agreed to lay low, but wanted to do it at his own place. The witches might come to them, then, and they might be able to capture them and find out who the priestesses were. Peter doubted that, to be honest. Stiles’ apartment was the last place any sane person would go, and the coven wouldn’t look for them there. Which reminded him of how unstable Stiles still was. He had been getting better, that wasn’t a question, but the vendetta was still everything to him. He would risk anything for it.

But he was incredibly sick of hotel rooms, and Stiles had a forty-two inch television and the extended editions of Lord of the Rings, not to mention a mattress that had probably cost more than a hundred fifty dollars. A bathroom where he couldn’t reach all three ceramic appliances at once. A kitchen where they could cook actual food. Reliable wi-fi. The list went on and on.

“Screw it,” he decided, and they went back to Stiles’ place. He checked his wards, but they were still intact, and Peter couldn’t hear anybody inside. They were cautious anyway, but it appeared as undisturbed as it had been when they arrived in town.

They went grocery shopping and Stiles made spaghetti and salad, and they ate while they watched The Fellowship of the Ring and then Peter fucked him on the sofa until he was begging for mercy.

“That was kinda like a date, huh?” Stiles murmured into the cushions afterwards.

“Stop talking,” Peter told him.

“Only because you asked nicely,” Stiles said, and fell asleep.

He woke up several times with nightmares. The first few times, he fell back to sleep without trouble. By the fourth, he was more upset. “I don’t know what’s wrong with me,” he said, rubbing both hands over his newly shorn hair. “They’re not usually this bad.”

Peter shrugged. “Even if a human’s nose is fifty times less sensitive than a werewolf’s, scent is strongly tied in with emotions. This place smells like home. It smells like your friends, so it’s going to call up bad memories. You’ll get used to it.”

Stiles nodded and shuddered a little, and then he said, “I’m going to get up and make myself some tea, I think,” and got out of bed without another word. Peter lay there for a while without him, feeling restless and strangely bereft, until he got up too. Stiles glanced up as he came into the kitchen and started making him a mug of tea as well.  The kitchen wasn’t as dark as it could have been. It was so late that it was early, and the sky was starting to lighten in the east.

They wound up drinking tea and then cocoa and watching more Buffy on the couch until both of them fell asleep for a few more hours. They were woken the next morning by a knock on the door. Stiles rubbed a hand over his hair and limped towards it without bothering with his crutch. He looked through the peephole and said, “S’Deputy Parrish. Wonder what he wants.”

Peter thought he probably had a clue or two, but instead of pointing that out, he said, “I’ll be in the bedroom.”

“’Kay,” Stiles said. He waited until Peter was out of sight, then pulled the door open. “Hey, Parrish, what’s up?”

Parrish’s voice was tight and unhappy. “Need to ask you a few questions. Mind if I come in?”

“Sure,” Stiles said, shuffling backwards. “You want some coffee?”

“Yeah, thanks. Did I wake you?”

“Yeah. Don’t worry about it. You know me, I’ve always been a night owl.” Peter can hear the noise of Stiles starting the coffee maker. “I’m gonna go grab a shirt. Be right back.” He came into the bedroom a moment later and pulled a T-shirt over his head, and got his crutch.

Back in the other room, Parrish had clearly noted the two tea mugs on the counter. “Do you have company?” he asked cautiously.

“Yeah,” Stiles said. “Paul’s still sleeping, though,” he added, and Peter was reluctantly impressed that Stiles remembered the name off his fake ID, even though he had only seen it once or twice at the hotels. “I can’t really stay here by myself. I’d need Life Alert or something.”

There was a long pause, and then Parrish said, “Cut the crap, Stilinski. You don’t need to pretend to be a fragile flower. I know you’re the one killing those women.”

“Uh . . .” Stiles said, not in an ‘oh shit I’m caught’ way but more of a ‘what the hell am I supposed to say to that’ sort of way. “Sure, Henry, if you say so.”

There was the clink of mugs, a slight thump as Stiles poured the coffee and put the pot back down. Peter got the impression that the two men were sizing each other up. Parrish finally said, “Look, Stiles. I know that they were involved in the explosion that killed your friends and injured your dad. I know they’ve been killing people since they got into town – some sort of sacrifice. I’ve been around the block a few times. Most of all, I know what _you_ are capable of. You killing them, okay, I could live with that. But you used me to find them. Our investigations into the first couple murders is how you found the rest of them. There’s no other reason you would have wanted that information. Are you going to try to deny that?”

Silence. Then Stiles said, “Are you wearing a wire?”

“What? No, Jesus Christ.” Parrish sounded impatient. “This is off the record. Do you think I would have come to try to get a confession out of you and arrest you by myself?”

“Maybe,” Stiles said, “if you thought it would get me to let my guard down.”

“Well, if that was my goal, it clearly didn’t work.”

Stiles changed the subject. “How did you connect them back to the explosion?”

“Money. Materials. Police work, Stiles. I’ve been putting it together for months. But all I had were aliases until suddenly women started turning up dead and you were strangely interested in the proceedings. It didn’t take a genius to put two and two together. And don’t try to tell me the guy in your bedroom is named Paul. Do you think I don’t know what a spiral means?”

Peter poked his head out of the bedroom. “He seems strangely intelligent for a cop. Is this the Twilight Zone?”

“Put a shirt on, Peter,” Stiles said, but Peter ignored him, sauntering towards the coffee. He rubbed a hand over his hair. “What do you want, Henry?”

Parrish hesitated. “Stiles,” he said, “you can’t just kill people.”

Stiles took a drink of his coffee and said, “I have an alibi, remember?”

“You have a flimsy alibi for one murder out of seven. Where were you the night before last, between six and eight PM?”

“Here,” Stiles said. “Peter and I had dinner together.”

“Yeah, I’ll grant that you were probably with Peter,” Parrish said, “but I know you weren’t here, because you were uptown killing Cheryl Caverly. What was with all the black goo in her backyard?”

“What black goo?”

“The black goo you used to draw a spiral on her backdoor,” Parrish snapped back. “Jesus, Stiles. Why didn’t you come to me from the beginning? We could have put it together, could have found evidence, could have done this legally.”

“What, like a bunch of witches would have let themselves be arrested and put in jail?” Stiles asked. “They would’ve buried the evidence and buried you along with it. Forget it, Henry. It’s almost over, anyway.”

Parrish pushed his hands through his hair, frustrated. “I don’t know what you want me to do.”

“Nothing,” Stiles said. “I want you to do nothing. You’re a good cop, Henry, but you have to let me handle this.”

“I might be the first one to put the pieces together, but I won’t be the only one,” Parrish said. “Carnes and Holt are on this case, too, and they’ll figure it out sooner rather than later. They don’t know you like I do, but the facts are all there. Carnes even mentioned you, but he doesn’t think you have the physical strength to pull off murders . . .” He counted on his fingers. “Jesus, I don’t even remember. It’s all blurred together in my head. But give him another week and it’ll occur to him that you might have an accomplice, someone stronger who’s doing the physical dirty work.”

“I’ll deal with it when it happens,” Stiles said. “Until then, just keep quiet.”

Parrish swallowed the last of his coffee and shook his head. “I will,” he said, “on the condition that you answer one question.”

“Shoot,” Stiles said. “Not, you know, _literally_.”

Parrish gave him an unimpressed look. “If I tried to arrest you, what would you do?”

“Knock your sorry ass out and leave you in my closet ‘til I was done, I guess,” Stiles said. “Or maybe in Melissa’s closet. People wouldn’t think to look for you there, and she’s a nurse, she’d know how to change your diaper and stuff.”

Now Parrish looked disgusted. “Okay,” he said. “I guess I’ll keep my mouth shut for now.” He turned and left the apartment without another word. Stiles locked the door behind him and sighed.

“He seems like a decent guy,” Peter observed.

“Yeah. He’s a good cop. I knew he would probably figure out what I was doing. I just hoped it would take him longer.” Stiles sank into the chair, one hand absently massaging at his thigh. “Fuck, I forgot to take my pill when he woke me up – d’you mind?”

Peter shook his head slightly, grabbing the little orange bottle and a glass of water for Stiles. “Take two – we’re not going anywhere today.”

Stiles made a face at him but complied. “Think I’m gonna take a hot bath while I wait for them to kick in,” he said. “That helps sometimes.”

“All right,” Peter said, vaguely waving him off as he peered into the refrigerator.

It was a disturbingly mundane day, especially in conjunction with the previous ‘date night’. Stiles played video games while Peter typed on his laptop, looking into jobs he might take since – if all went well – he wouldn’t be in Beacon Hills much longer. Stiles did his physical therapy and reassembled his investigative wall since they still had two priestesses to identify and it looked like they might be staying at his place long term. He looked up different protective wards to see if there were any stronger, and he and Peter got into a debate on magical theory and whether or not they could tap into the Nemeton’s power. Stiles gave Peter a massage and Peter gave Stiles a blowjob. Stiles grilled steaks for dinner and mocked Peter for wanting his as rare as possible and he made cauliflower to go with it because a balanced diet was important.

They watched The Two Towers and Stiles told Peter about the first time he had seen the first movie in the trilogy, how he and Scott had gone on opening night and as soon as it was over they just turned around and bought more tickets. He talked about Scott without crying, but without the same dull flatness as before, with just a note of sorrow in his voice instead. But it was a good memory, he said, and he wanted to cherish it.

They had sex on the sofa and it seemed slower than usual, although maybe that was just due to the tone of the entire day. Stiles tried to fall asleep on the couch but Peter prodded him to his feet and into the bathroom to clean up, then into the bedroom where cleaning up was quickly rendered pointless because they wound up having sex again. Stiles fell asleep sprawled all over Peter, his face mashed into the older man’s chest, and Peter thought about moving him but in the end decided it would be too much trouble.

Peter woke when he felt Stiles shift next to him. At first, he thought it was another nightmare. But when he rolled over, he saw Stiles sitting up, frowning into the dim room. “What is it?” he asked, rubbing a hand over his face.

“Something isn’t right,” Stiles said. “The nemeton, it’s . . . it doesn’t feel right.” He scrambled out of bed, grabbing the wall to steady himself when his weak leg threatened to give out. Without further conversation, he started getting dressed. Peter considered the options, then shoved the blankets back. He pulled on a pair of jeans and a T-shirt and followed Stiles out of the apartment.

Stiles was edgy and quiet on the drive. Peter parked on the side of one of the dirt roads through the forest, and Stiles was out of the car before Peter had the key out of the ignition. Peter was a little worried that Stiles would try to run, whereupon he would almost inevitably injure himself. It was only a quarter moon, and the woods were dark. But although Stiles set a quick pace, it was still less than a jog and more of a determined power walk.

Peter kept his eyes and ears open for anything out of the ordinary, but detected nothing. Even when they got to the nemeton itself, everything looked normal. Stiles leaned down and put a hand on the enormous trunk, as if greeting an old friend. Then he shook his head. “Everything seems okay.”

“I don’t think anyone has been here, either.” Peter ranged out a little ways. “No strange scents, no footprints. What did you feel, exactly?”

Stiles chewed on his lower lip. “A great disturbance in the Force?” he tried.

Peter gave him an annoyed look. “It’s five AM, Stiles. If you got me out of bed at dawn for a ‘disturbance in the Force’ . . .”

“Sorry, I’m just not sure how else to describe it.” Stiles huffed out a breath. With one hand still resting on the nemeton’s trunk, he closed his eyes. Peter watched as he went still, tapping into the tree’s well of power. He started to feel uneasy. It was small at first, like the gut instinct that someone was behind him. He glanced over his shoulder, but nobody was there. The feeling persisted, tingling in his stomach and making the hair on the back of his neck and his arms rise up in gooseflesh.

The longer it went on, the worse it got. Peter considered himself a brave man – he had certainly been in a lot of bad situations – but the wolf in him felt a primal urge to flee, to tuck his tail between his legs and find cover. “Stiles,” he said, sharply.

Stiles blinked, and the feeling abruptly stopped. “Could you feel that?” he asked, and Peter nodded. “Okay. That’s what it felt like.”

“Christ,” Peter said. “Don’t do that again,” he added, and Stiles shrugged. “If you ask me, what you were feeling was the coven’s attempts to break into the nemeton’s power. Even if they weren’t physically present.”

“You don’t have to be,” Stiles said. “I mean, all the stuff that we did to connect to it back then, drowning ourselves and everything, we didn’t even know where it was.”

“And neither do they,” Peter agreed. “That’s the problem. They don’t know the nemeton’s physical location.”

“Great,” Stiles said, and yawned.

“Well, whatever spell they were trying, it obviously didn’t work, so let’s go grab another couple hours of sleep.”

Stiles agreed, but by the time they got back to the apartment, the sun was coming up, and that made it hard to get back to sleep. Peter eventually had to pin him down and screw him silly before he managed. That resulted in them sleeping later than they meant to, but Stiles was energized and ready to get back to work. He made coffee while Peter perused his crime wall. There were five witches to go.

“I think we should go after these two,” he said, tapping two pictures that were side by side.

“You want to take two at once?” Stiles asked, gulping his coffee even though it was still hot.

“Well, I don’t want to, but if I recall correctly, these two have stuck together like bread and butter ever since the murders started,” Peter said. “They live in the same apartment complex and they both work downtown. Whereas she – ” He tapped the remaining picture – “we haven’t seen hide or hair of her since she went to the police and told them she saw you kill witch number four. My guess is that she took shelter with one of the priestesses.” He looked at the picture thoughtfully. “Does she have any sisters?”

“Ummmm,” Stiles said, shuffling through papers. “No. No blood relatives.”

“Hm. Still doesn’t rule it out. She could be particularly close to one of the priestesses, a lover or some such, or they could be grooming her to replace the one we already killed,” Peter said. “Either way, my guess is that we’re going to have to tackle these last three together, and we’re going to have to make them come to us.”

Stiles nodded. “But they probably won’t come out until they’re the only ones left,” he said. “Which leaves us these two.”

Peter ran his finger along the text underneath their pictures. “So. These two have been carpooling. They work within a block of each other. Now, we’ve been by both their apartments late at night and they’re usually both in the same one. But one time we swung by earlier, eight PM, and nobody was at either.”

“Which means they aren’t going straight home from work,” Stiles said, nodding. “So where are they going?”

“And now is when we find that out,” Peter said. He glanced at his watch. It was nearly two PM. They had slept late, but still had a few hours to kill. “I want to dig into this last witch. There has to be some way to connect her to the priestesses. If we can identify them, we can find a better way to lure them out.”

Stiles nodded. “I can’t get any more info from the precinct,” he said, “but I still have old-fashioned skullduggery available.”

He spent a while compiling information from a variety of sources, some outright illegal and some just sketchy. At four PM, they left Stiles’ apartment and went downtown. Peter cruised down the main drag twice. One witch worked in a jewelry store; the other was a hairdresser. “That’s terrifying, knowing what you can do with people’s hair,” Stiles commented.

It took almost twenty minutes, but Peter found a parking space from which they could see the lot where the witch’s car was parked. Then they waited. And waited. The jewelry shop closed at five; the salon at six. Still they waited. It was long past sunset when the two witches emerged from their individual shops at the exact same moment and started walking towards the car.

Peter had practice following people in cars. It wasn’t as easy as the movies made it look, but it wasn’t difficult, either. You just had to keep things low key. He followed the two women into one of the warehouse districts downtown. “Such memories,” he said, as they pulled into what looked like an abandoned parking garage.

A minute later, the women went into one of the warehouses. It was solidly built, with few windows. Peter scaled the wall to get a look inside, but it was full of old shelving and racks of industrial equipment, and he couldn’t see much of anything. Stiles put a hand on the old brick wall and said, “Warded, and good.”

“So it’s a safehouse,” Peter said, then frowned. “No. Otherwise they’d be sleeping here, too. They’re doing something inside. Cooking up some sort of witchcraft to use against us.” He contemplated for a few moments, then continued, ““Well, we’re sure as hell not getting in there tonight. Let’s come back and check it out during daylight, now that we know where they’re holing up.”

“Shiny,” Stiles said.

Peter glanced at him with a slight frown. “Shiny?” he asked.

Stiles blinked. “You’ve . . . never seen Firefly?”

Peter rolled his eyes. “No, I haven’t. I didn’t see the point in getting into a series that had been summarily cancelled and had no future and couldn’t possibly be as good as everyone made it out to be.”

Stiles’ mouth worked for a few moments without sound. Then he pointed at Peter and said, “I’m going to let that slide, because you don’t know what you’re saying. And now we’re going back to my apartment and ordering Chinese food, because you _have_ to eat Chinese food while watching Firefly, and we’re going to marathon the entire damned – well, okay, probably we can’t watch all of it in one night, but we are going to make a valiant attempt.”

“I don’t really – ”

“Shut up. Your opinion has not been requested,” Stiles said, and headed back towards the car.

Peter gave his backside a considering glance, then jogged to catch up. “You’re incredibly sexy when you order me around,” he said. “Try not to do it too often. We wouldn’t want it to lose its charm.”

“Oh, no, we wouldn’t want that,” Stiles said, rolling his eyes.

 

~ ~ ~ ~

 

Stiles reluctantly cut them off after six episodes, because it was past two o’clock in the morning, and he wanted to get plenty of sleep so they would be fresh to tackle whatever was in the warehouse the next morning. Peter, who was at that point enthralled, reluctantly agreed. For the first time in weeks, they fell asleep without having sex.

Instead they had it the next morning, when Peter woke to Stiles all over him, and was happy to oblige. They got to the warehouse after lunch. The area was deserted. Peter didn’t hear anyone nearby. They left the car parked a good distance away, just in case. The warehouse had two separate doors. One was a small side door that he guessed led into an office; the other was a larger door for loading and unloading.

Stiles stood at the smaller door and leaned against it, eyes closed, for several long minutes. Peter was thinking about interrupting him when he finally pulled away. “Wards,” he said. “Very good. _Very_ subtle. I’m impressed.”

Peter nodded. “Can you get through them?”

“Yes and no,” Stiles said. “See, the thing is, they’re a double layer. The general set of wards, yeah, I could wiggle us through. The problem is that there’s a secondary set that would respond to any disturbance to the first set.”

“Like an alarm system,” Peter surmised.

“Exactly,” Stiles said. “If I did that, the witches would know. They could trigger whatever trap they’ve got set up for us – maybe even trigger it remotely, depending on what it is and how they’ve set up. Now, we could just walk through. Leave the wards alone. Then they wouldn’t realize we were here. But the main set of wards would take a chunk out of our power.”

Peter considered this for a few moments. “How big a chunk?”

Stiles shrugged. “Hard to say. Worse for you than for me. It’s not like my magic is much good in a fight; that’s why I carry a gun and a baseball bat. For you . . . well, you’re an alpha, so you wouldn’t be rendered powerless. You’d still be able to shift at least partially, but you wouldn’t be able to take the alpha shape. You’d still heal, but slower. Still be stronger and faster than a human, but not as much as usual.”

“So basically, it would knock me back to about beta level,” Peter said, and Stiles nodded. “I can handle that. It’s worth it to at least get inside and look around. If we don’t like what we see, we can leave before they realize we’re here.”

“Okay,” Stiles said. The door didn’t have a lock on it, and the hinges screeched dramatically when he opened it. “They want us to get in here,” he commented, heading inside. “The wards are pretty much a win-win scenario for them. They were probably hoping I wouldn’t notice the double layer, but even if I did, it still sets things up to their advantage.”

“True,” Peter said, “but I can’t help but wonder how much the witch who figured out who you were told the others. They know it’s you, obviously – but that type of wards would work much better on a beta. It would basically render them powerless. These witches may not realize you’re working with an alpha.”

“Well, that would make sense,” Stiles said, glancing over. “They know for a fact that they killed the alpha. It would make more sense that maybe another beta in the pack survived and we’re working together. And let’s face it, you and I were hardly buddies. It might not have occurred to them that I would go to you for help. We don’t even know for sure that the witch found us in the hotel because she saw you had gotten a room there. She might have tracked us down some other way.”

“We might never know,” Peter agreed. “But it does work in our favor.”

Although there was a lot of shelving and equipment on the periphery of the room, the center had been cleared out. The concrete floor had been scrubbed. There was a large cauldron in the center, filled with suspiciously red liquid. “Bubble, bubble, toil and trouble,” Stiles commented. The cauldron was in the center of a large symbol. Peter stood back while Stiles paced around it, examining it from afar and then up close, practically pressing his face into the concrete. “Nice,” he finally said, and Peter gestured for him to get on with it. “It’s an animation spell. Basically, everything they’ve put in that cauldron – which looks like a _lot_ of blood, seriously, at least eight people’s worth of blood – would come to life and try to kill anything in its vicinity.”

“Like . . . blood tentacles?” Peter asked, a little skeptically.

Stiles shook his head. “Blood has memory,” he said. “It would coalesce back into the shape of whatever it came from. In this case, people, or maybe animals. It could be a pack of wild dogs or something like that. If you cut it in half, it would just reform. I’m sure the witches have some talisman that would protect them from it, but us? It would rip us to pieces. And with only the two doors, they could keep us from escaping ‘til it was done pretty easily.”

“I see,” Peter said. “And what do we plan to do about this?”

Stiles knelt down next to the symbol, swiped his tongue across his index finger, and then started rubbing at one of the markings. “That,” he said. “It’s just chalk.”

Peter smirked despite himself, watching Stiles as he went around the circle and made a few discreet changes. “It won’t do something . . . else, will it?” he asked.

“Nah,” Stiles said. “I’m just removing a few crucial lines here and there that would direct the flow of power. It’s gonna backlash like a bitch, but that’ll affect whichever witch triggers it, not us.”

“Excellent,” Peter said. “She’ll almost definitely trigger it as soon as she realizes we’re here, so . . .”

They debated strategy for a little while. It was going to be a long day in the warehouse, waiting for the witches to arrive, which wouldn’t be for hours. Stiles didn’t want to leave and come back and risk disturbing the wards, so they were stuck there. They both had their phones, but the wi-fi in the area was sketchy. Stiles won’t even let them have sex, because if the witches showed up in the middle, things could get awkward. “I’m not going to die because a witch shows up while my pants are around my ankles,” he said.

That seemed fair to Peter, all things considered, so instead they kept themselves entertained playing word games and talking about movies or sports or places they had been. Stiles was edgy and restless, frequently getting up to walk around even though Peter would have preferred they remain hidden in the rows of shelving.

After what seemed like an eternity, they heard the horrible screeching of the doors to the outside. Stiles and Peter were at that point settled in one corner of the warehouse, playing hangman for lack of a better way to pass the time. Peter heard the two women coming about a minute before they got to the door, so they were braced for the noise.

“And I still can’t believe that Amber said that,” the taller of the women was saying as they came inside. “I mean, who does she think she’s fooling?”

“Who cares?” the other women said. “If we can pull this off, it won’t matter what Amber thinks.”

Peter sighed a little. Backstabbing and treachery was helpful to their cause, but he found it tiresome to listen to. He glanced out as the two women started towards the cauldron and nodded to Stiles. They wanted that spell triggered before they had had a chance to examine it and realize it had been tampered with. Stiles didn’t have to do very much. He just reached up and gently ran a hand along the wall. Peter couldn’t sense anything, but it must have done _something_ to the wards, because both witches responded as if he had set off a bomb. They whirled in their direction. One of them lifted a hand and snarled out a harsh, twisty sounding word in a language Peter didn’t know.

The lines on the floor glowed crimson from her feet, the power racing along them, and then suddenly snapped free. She screamed as the glow intensified, and even from twenty feet away, Peter could feel the heat coming off them. The light got even brighter, and then the witch simply _exploded_. What was left of her collapsed into a heap.

The second witch was clearly stunned, but she recovered well. By the time Peter had gotten out from behind the shelving and lunged at her, she was ready. She was holding two small chains in her hand, each one only a few inches long, but then she started swinging them in a rhythmic motion. By the time Peter got to her, one of them was a foot long, and it smashed into his face just as he reached for her. He staggered back, and Stiles darted out from behind the shelves. The chain was heading for his arm, but he swung his crutch up instead to deflect it. Apparently, the chain was weighted at the end, because it wrapped a loop around the crutch and yanked it out of Stiles’ grip.

Stiles was left off balance, but managed to control his fall. He rolled to get out of the way of Peter’s next move. The chains were still getting longer, and there were more of them now, the ends of them wrapped around the witch’s hands so she could control them. Three of them wrapped around Peter’s leg before he could manage to dodge, and she flung him halfway across the warehouse.

He hit the wall hard and wound up in a heap on the ground, trying to catch his breath. As an alpha, he could have bounced back from that, but given the chunk of his power that the wards had taken, he couldn’t quite manage to scramble back to his feet.

The delay was costly. The chains wrapped around the support posts for a unit of shelving, and the next thing Peter knew, roughly a ton of metal equipment and shelving was falling on him. He had just enough time to lift his arms to protect his head, and it didn’t help much. The impact of the weight landing on him knocked the breath out of him, and Stiles’ screaming was almost as loud as the blood rushing in his ears.

 

~ ~ ~ ~


	10. Chapter 10

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> This chapter is such a weird combination of so many things. It's like angst and fluff and geekery and smut all in one chapter, I'm so confused...

 

Peter thought he blacked out for a minute, but he couldn’t be sure. He jerked awake when he heard the unmistakable sound of a roar of flames. His instinctual, panicked reaction got him nowhere. He was literally buried underneath the debris. It took him a minute to calm down enough to realize that despite the noise, he couldn’t smell smoke or feel any heat.

An alpha would have been able to lift the wreckage of him. Peter couldn’t. He crawled instead, squirming as much as he could, using his arms to pull himself forward. Things shifted and groaned uneasily above him, but he managed to get far enough to be able to see what was going on. The witch had started a fire underneath the cauldron. She had Stiles’ limp body wrapped in her chains, suspended in midair. Peter swore underneath his breath and made it another grueling three inches forward, freeing his arms.

The debris above him shifted. Something fell, and a heavy beam landed across his lower leg. The pain was breathtaking, and he had to bite back the scream that wanted to escape. The witch still didn’t look over at him, absorbed in whatever she was doing with the cauldron. Peter forced himself to stop and just breathe for a minute.

The witch walked over to where Stiles was hanging and slapped him across the face. He came awake with a startled shout. “Well, it’s just you and me,” the witch said sweetly. “I’m going to ask you a few questions, little boy, and if you know what’s good for you, you’re going to answer them.”

“Why don’t you bite my persqueeter,” Stiles said between gritted teeth.

She clearly had no idea what that meant, but didn’t let that bother her. “Do you know why we came here?”

“I could take a few guesses,” Stiles said, shaking himself, trying to clear his head. The chains rattled.

“We want the nemeton.”

“Yep, that was gonna be one of them,” Stiles said. “Can’t see why. It’s not all it’s cracked up to be. Basically just a tree in the middle of the forest that attracts a lot of unwanted attention.”

“It’s the reason you’re alive, in case you’ve forgotten,” the witch said. “Tell me where it is, and I’ll kill you quickly.”

Stiles looked down. Peter followed his gaze. The younger man was suspended over the cauldron now, and Peter couldn’t see inside it, but he was sure from the look on Stiles’ face that the liquid was boiling. “Pretty sure you won’t.”

She laughed at him. Two more chains whipped out and grabbed him by the ankles, keeping his legs fully stretched out. His feet dangled dangerously close to the lip of the cauldron. “Last chance, Stiles. Tell me where the nemeton is.”

“I would rather clean out that entire cauldron with my _tongue_ ,” Stiles growled, “while it was still hot. Fuck you, bitch.”

She lowered him an inch. The tips of his toes must have met the liquid, because his entire body bowed and spasmed like he had been hit by lightning. He didn’t make a noise, but Peter could smell the pain, the sudden flood of adrenaline and endorphins. He collected himself enough to start shoving at the beam that had his leg trapped. It moved with agonizing slowness, a millimeter at a time. “You’re a fascinating person,” the witch said, pulling him back up. “We knew you had survived, but who cared? What good is an emissary without a pack? Unless you turned Darach – we were prepared for that, but after a few weeks went by and nothing happened, we stopped worrying about it.”

“I don’t like Darachs,” Stiles wheezed. “They smell.”

“Quite the jokester.” She lowered him again, about two inches this time. A strangled noise left his throat, and she left him in for a few full seconds before lifting him back out. “So you used the nemeton to keep yourself alive. Which means you know where it is. How about this? An exchange of information. I’ll tell you something interesting. Aren’t you curious?”

“Die in a fire,” Stiles replied.

The witch contemplated him for a few moments, then smiled sweetly and said, “What if I said there was a spell that would heal your father?”

Stiles went still. Peter grimaced and redoubled his efforts to lift the beam off his leg, although it got him nowhere. After a moment, Stiles gritted out, “There is no such spell. Do you think I didn’t look? Do you think I wouldn’t have sacrificed _anything_ to help him?”

“There’s no spell that you _know_ of,” the witch said.

“You’re a filthy liar,” Stiles said, “and I don’t believe you.”

“Sure,” the witch said. “Just leave him. I guess that makes sense. It’s your fault he’s like this, after all.”

“Don’t you even fucking – ”

“He was okay at first,” the witch said. “I saw him there. He even got out of his flipped car on his own. The firefighters and everyone started to arrive, and they were going through the wreckage. And the EMTs kept telling him – ‘sit down, Sheriff, you could be seriously injured’. ‘Come on, Sheriff, we need to get you to the hospital.’ And he was just ignoring them. Pushing through the debris, shouting your name, calling for you. But you weren’t there. You had already left.”

“Shut up, shut the fuck up – ”

“If you had just stayed put,” the witch continued, “your father could have gone straight to the hospital and he’d be okay right now. But no, you had yourself to take care of. You had your vendetta to worry about. So you left him.”

“Shut up!” Stiles screamed.

She lowered him again, an inch at a time. Stiles howled, his body thrashing against the chains, as inch after inch of his feet was lowered into the liquid.

“Tell me where the nemeton is, Stiles,” the witch said. “Just tell me that and I’ll drop you. You’ll be dead in ten seconds or less. It’ll be painful, but it’ll be quick. And then it’ll be over. You won’t hurt anymore. Isn’t that what you want, to stop hurting?”

“I don’t, I can’t,” Stiles sobbed.

“And then once you’re dead, the scales will be balanced and your father will wake up, and everything will be as it should be,” the witch whispered, and that was when Peter hit her in the back of the head with a piece of rebar.

Stiles dropped a few precipitous inches before Peter managed to grab the chains and yank them to the side. The younger man fell to the ground in a heap, his entire body shaking with sobs. The witch tried to pick him back up, but Peter had a solid grip on the chains now, and pulled them right out of her hands. Within moments, he had one of them wrapped around her neck. She gasped and kicked as he flipped her over her shoulder and right into the cauldron.

“Ten seconds, you said?” he asked, as she screamed and tried to push herself out. “Was that only if the head was submerged? How long will you live like this?” He shoved her back down but made sure to keep her mouth above the surface, keeping the chain wrapped around her neck and not even caring about the way the liquid lapped over his hands and scalded his skin. “I hope it’s a few minutes. I hope you feel every _inch_ of your flesh melting off.”

The witch thrashed and wailed, but even at a beta level, Peter’s strength was far superior. Her struggles started to dwindle, becoming less purposeful and more spasmodic. He continued to hold her there until they had stopped altogether. Then he checked a pulse. There wasn’t one. Another few moments later, and he abruptly felt power rush back into his body. The wards had failed. The worst of his injuries started to heal.

He took a few minutes to simply lie on the warehouse floor and regret ever getting involved in this. Stiles was curled into fetal position. The chains were gone. Peter crawled over to him, but Stiles pulled away from him.

“Stiles, we are leaving, now get up,” Peter said, and Stiles just continued to lie there. Peter thought about letting him have a minute, but the sooner his feet got medical attention, the better. Besides, he doubted Stiles was going to recover on his own, and he didn’t think being gentle would help. He grabbed Stiles by the chin and yanked him up so they were facing. “Listen to me,” he said, staying quiet and calm, but putting force into the words. “You can believe that bitch if you want, but she’s wrong.”

“He looked for me,” Stiles sobbed. “If I hadn’t left – ”

“Then _you would be dead_ ,” Peter said. “Would your father be any happier with that conclusion? If you had let yourself die, and he had had to bury you, when you could have saved yourself? Do you think your father wouldn’t be crying by your grave every night, asking himself why you hadn’t tried to get to the nemeton? Would that be _better_?”

Stiles stared at him, wide-eyed. A little shudder went through him.

Since he seemed to be returning to rationality, Peter continued more quietly. “Stiles, your father was badly injured, and head injuries are tricky. There’s absolutely no way to know whether or not getting him to the hospital sooner would have helped. Odds are good that it wouldn’t have changed anything. And you know that your father wouldn’t want you to blame yourself. This is not your fault. The blame belongs to the people who hurt him. The people that we are hunting down. And if you don’t get off this floor, they’re going to win.”

Stiles swallowed and nodded. Peter had to help him up, and that was a mistake, because he estimated about half his bones were broken. He swayed and caught himself on a shelf. “Fuck,” he said. The alpha power was trying to heal him, but it took a lot of energy, and he was exhausted. He felt himself start to slide to the ground, and was only dimly aware of Stiles grabbing him around the waist to keep him on his feet.

“We need to do something about your feet,” he said, as Stiles supported him as they hobbled back to the car. Stiles could barely walk, and it was clear that he was in a lot of pain. “I know a remedy or two.”

Somehow, they got back to the car. Somehow, Stiles drove them back to his apartment. Somehow, they got up the stairs and inside. Stiles locked both locks and Peter sat him down to examine his feet. The water hadn’t been boiling yet, only scalding, so his feet were red and blistered but probably wouldn’t require a lot of medical intervention. There were some lighter burns on his ankles and lower calves from the brief dip he had taken just before Peter had gotten him free. He had Stiles run them underneath cold water for as long as he could take it. Then he smeared some honey on them. “Honey is an amazing natural remedy for a lot of different things,” he told Stiles.

“Thanks, Martha Stewart,” Stiles mumbled. “Gonna make the bed sticky.”

“Mm hm.” Peter stripped him out of his clothes and looked at the terrible black and blue marks where the chains had squeezed him and tossed him around. There wasn’t much he could do about that. He was sure that he was sporting similar marks. He wrapped Stiles’ honeyed feet in light bandages and made him lie down. Then he sprawled out next to him.

“Ten down, three to go,” he whispered against Stiles’ ear, but the younger man was already asleep.

 

~ ~ ~ ~

 

The pain woke Stiles twice during the night, and Peter woke up both times because Stiles kept trying to get out of bed but wasn’t able to walk. “Cut it out,” Peter growled, going for Stiles’ pain pills, which he was abusing somewhat heavily despite earlier concerns.

“I can’t just – make you – carry me around,” Stiles said between labored breaths, trying to hobble towards the bathroom. “You’re not – my fucking – valet.”

“Never had a valet before,” Peter responded automatically. “Probably won’t care for it. I’ll most likely kill you in the morning.”

That got Stiles to laugh, and back down from his pride enough to let Peter get him a glass of water and his pills. “It just doesn’t seem like you,” he said, once he was drugged back into an easy-going lassitude. “Fetchin’ things for me. Carrying me ‘round.”

“It isn’t like me,” Peter said, “but desperate times call for desperate measures.”

“Fair enough,” Stiles mumbled, before the drugs pulled him back under.

The healing that Peter had to do left him exhausted, grouchy, and surprisingly cold. He wanted to keep Stiles as close to him as possible. He didn’t complain even when Stiles sandwiched his warm feet between Peter’s freezing legs. They spent that entire first day in bed except for a few brief trips to the kitchen or the bathroom. On the second day, Peter was mostly healed but still tired, and Stiles could still barely walk, so they spent the day on the sofa, watching the rest of Firefly (movie included).

In between episodes, they debated different strategies for drawing out the remaining three witches. Peter figured it was only a matter of time before they thought to check Stiles’ apartment, which didn’t make either of them particularly happy. Stiles was concerned about civilian casualties, and to a lesser degree, people calling the police if there was too much noise. Peter just didn’t like the space. “We need a place where we’ll be able to separate them,” he said. “Somewhere with a lot of hallways and rooms.”

“Okay, I’ll just conjure up a place like that,” Stiles said. The confinement had them both tense and snappish. “Then I can just e-mail this last witch to let her know where to meet us.”

Peter gave him a withering look. The problem – they both agreed on this – was that setting a trap that didn’t look like a trap was an incredibly delicate procedure. Anything that drew the witches to a place that would be considered friendly territory to Stiles would be a disaster. It had to be neutral ground. But that, of course, left them few options and no way to prepare.

“Do you think the police station would be considered neutral ground?” Stiles asked thoughtfully.

“I suppose it would depend on the lure,” Peter said. “Why, what are you thinking?”

“I’m not sure,” Stiles said. “I guess I’m just wondering why _this_ witch was the one who pretended to have seen me kill witch number four. Did she know a cop? Did she have some connection to the station somehow? Could we use that?”

“Mm,” Peter said. “An interesting notion. Can we look into the officer who took her report?”

“I did, but . . . nothing,” Stiles said, with a shrug. He continued to stare at the wall, and then abruptly wiped a hand over his eyes. “I miss my dad,” he said. “He could . . . he had this way where, when I would get stuck on something, he would just stand back and look at everything and just . . . find the piece I was missing. I guess it’s about distance. I could do the same for him, sometimes. I was getting better at it, but he was always . . . I just really miss him.”

Peter sat down on the kitchen table, pulling a leg up to his chest. “Melissa told me you don’t go visit him.”

“Nn. I don’t. I’d say I _can’t_ , but . . . it’s not that. I just won’t. I did once, and . . . that was enough. I saw . . . he wasn’t there. It was just . . . a body. It wasn’t my dad. And I don’t . . . I don’t want to remember him that way. All blank and . . . _vacant_. It’s not him, so I won’t go see him.”

“That makes sense,” Peter said.

“Thanks,” Stiles said, and wiped his eyes again. “I know Melissa goes to see him every day, and that . . . that’s fine, and I . . . I know part of why she does it. People with brain damage like that . . . they don’t live long, a lot of the time. I mean, the brain is responsible for more than just your heartbeat and your breathing. It connects all these systems . . . and they all start to fall apart. She’s just waiting . . . she wants to be there for him when he dies and I . . . I can respect that. But I can’t do it. Because to me, he’s already dead. I would visit his grave if I could. But I can’t go see him like this.”

Peter reached out, unthinking, and rubbed a hand over Stiles’ hair. “I understand.”

Stiles gave him a sideways look. “You were pissed that Laura never visited you,” he said.

“Don’t make the comparison,” Peter said. “My condition was psychological, caused by trauma and pain. The company of family, the comfort of pack, it could have helped me. Your father’s condition is neurological. You being there makes no difference to him. The situations aren’t alike, so don’t try to make them that way.”

Stiles nodded and let out a shaky breath. “C’mon, let’s . . . talk about something else.”

“All right,” Peter said. “Let’s pull a roster for the station and see if we can find anyone who has a connection to our witch.”

They did that and wound up getting sidetracked by a debate over which modern Sherlock adaptation was better. “How can you not like BBC Sherlock?” Stiles demanded, limping over to the coffee maker.

“It’s repetitive and cliché,” Peter said, rolling his eyes. “Sherlock is always right about everything, nobody ever gets the upper hand over him, everyone winds up apologizing for their presumption in not fawning over his genius. I’ll admit that I found the pilot entertaining enough, but it went downhill from there and never got much better.”

“But Elementary’s Sherlock is all wrong,” Stiles argued. “He’s too soft.”

“Listening to the opinions of people around him and acknowledging that he might not _always_ be one hundred percent correct is not being _soft_ ,” Peter said. “He’s a dynamic character, changing and evolving. BBC Sherlock is static.”

“While I’ll grant that,” Stiles said, “Watson argues with him so much. Like, look at BBC Sherlock and Watson, they’re so in tune with each other, Sherlock can just shout ‘Vatican cameos’ and Watson knows he needs to drop to the floor. You don’t see Watson doing that on Elementary.”

“You’re saying that like it’s a bad thing that Joan Watson doesn’t swallow all of Sherlock’s shit like BBC Watson does,” Peter said skeptically.

Stiles blinked at him and suddenly said, “Wow. Wowwwww. Do you even realize how philosophical this argument is?”

“What? No,” Peter said, frowning.

“You like Elementary Sherlock. I like BBC Sherlock. BBC Sherlock is an arrogant, egotistical, possibly sociopathic dick. Elementary Sherlock is an eccentric but at least marginally sensitive dick. Do those two descriptions remind you of anyone in this room?”

Peter thought about that and decided he was profoundly uncomfortable with Stiles’ conclusions. “You’re overthinking this.”

“Whatever you say, Sherlock,” Stiles said, with a wide smirk. “We know you’re always right about everything.”

“If you call me that again, I’ll kick your ass,” Peter remarked.

Stiles just laughed at him, which Peter found somewhat discomfiting. He could remember, mere weeks ago, when Stiles was actually somewhat intimidated by him. He supposed it had been naïve to imagine that would last through all the sex they had been having.

“And you’re still wrong,” Peter said, just because he could.

“About what?” Stiles asked, still laughing.

“Sherlock. Besides, BBC Sherlock made the police look completely incompetent. At least in Elementary, the police might not have been brilliant like Sherlock, but they knew how to do their jobs. As the son of a sheriff, I’d think you wouldn’t appreciate a police force that needed its hand held before they could make a simple arrest.”

“Granted, that did bug me sometimes,” Stiles said. “And I didn’t say BBC Sherlock was completely without flaws, I just . . .” His voice trailed off. “Hey,” he said, suddenly. “I think I have an idea.”

 

~ ~ ~ ~

 

After a lot of debate and bickering, Stiles and Peter had what they considered a working plan. Stiles got on the phone and started setting things up. They required quite a bit of argument, but in the end, he prevailed. By the time they had everything they needed, the sun had set.

“What do you want to do for dinner?” Peter asked, looking through the meager contents of Stiles’ fridge.

“God, I feel like I’m choosing my last meal,” Stiles said. Peter rolled his eyes at him. “Yeah, yeah. Greek okay? Jerusalem deli delivers.”

“Sure.”

“And we can finish watching Lord of the Rings. It’ll help us feel all triumphant and shit.”

“Nothing beats a positive attitude,” Peter agreed, and Stiles snorted at him. He placed their order and put the movie on. The food arrived about thirty minutes later, and they ate on the sofa while they watched. Stiles was fidgety, but he didn’t seem upset, just edgy. Peter ignored his squirming as best as he could but made a mental note that he was going to have to fuck Stiles senseless if he wanted to get any sleep.

That was his plan, but when the movie was over and the leftovers were put away, Stiles said, “You want a massage? Giving them, I don’t know, it settles my nerves a bit, I guess.”

“Sure,” Peter said, because Stiles really was good at the massages and he wasn’t about to turn one down. He tugged his shirt off and headed into the bedroom. Stiles made him undress the rest of the way, and Peter didn’t argue because his legs were still sore from what had happened at the warehouse. Hell, his everything was still a little sore.

Stiles started on his shoulders and the back of his neck and worked his way down. His movements were slow, rhythmic, hypnotizing. Peter felt his entire body start to relax. Stiles had magic hands, that was truth. He gave a content little sigh and closed his eyes. Stiles moved down his back, using just enough massage oil to keep things smooth. It was only barely scented, which Peter appreciated. He didn’t want to drown in a sea of lavender.

Stiles rubbed his feet and the back of his calves and thighs and then his hands, and his touch was firm, intimate without being sexual. He found every knot that had thought about forming in Peter’s shoulders and back, and he never seemed to get tired. Peter thought almost an hour had passed when Stiles rubbed one gentle hand over the small of his back and then his ass. He could hear Stiles’ heartbeat picking up. It didn’t come as much surprise when Stiles trailed his fingers down the cleft of his ass and then hesitantly pressed a finger inside.

“Is this okay?” he asked, his voice a little soft.

“No,” Peter said, mostly to see what Stiles would do. Stiles withdrew immediately and then crawled up so he could lay beside Peter.

“What do you want, then?” Stiles asked.

“I want you to show a little conviction. I’m not going to break if you touch me. I’m not that fragile.” Peter grabbed one of the pillows and slid it underneath his hips, making himself a little more comfortable. “Fuck me if you want to fuck me.”

“Ohhhhh m’fuckin God,” Stiles groaned. “You’re such a – ” He didn’t bother to finish his sentence. Peter obviously didn’t care. He was feeling content and mellow, worn out from the healing and soothed by Stiles’ hands. He relaxed into it as Stiles opened him up, his movements more confident now that he had been given permission, and let out a little sigh.

Stiles fucked him deep and slow, and Peter arched into it but let Stiles control the pace, putting in as little effort as possible. Stiles was enthusiastic by comparison, swearing and gasping, leaning down to kiss or bite at Peter’s shoulder blades or the back of his neck. Peter just let him do what he wanted. Stiles was surprisingly good at this, and the friction from where his cock was trapped between his body and the pillow was starting to drive him towards the edge. He thrust into it, unthinking. Stiles leaned down and licked a slow trail down his spine, and Peter’s orgasm hit him in a rush. Stiles fucked him through it, came a few minutes later, and then gracelessly collapsed beside him.

“Didn’t think you’d let me,” he murmured into Peter’s shoulder.

“It’s just sex,” Peter muttered, not opening his eyes. “I’m not less of a man because I like a cock in my ass occasionally.”

Stiles snickered at that, and kept kissing Peter until he fell asleep.

 

~ ~ ~ ~

 

“Tell me one thing about Brandon,” Stiles said the next morning, while they lay in bed before mustering up the energy to get up. “Just . . . any one thing.”

Peter opened his mouth to tell Stiles to mind his own business. What came out was, “He used to call me ‘Mr. Hale’ when he was teasing me. Because, you know, we met under professional circumstances, so that was what he called me for a long time, then after we started dating, obviously he called me Peter . . . except when he thought I was being annoying. It didn’t bother him that I was an egotistical jerk, but he didn’t just let me get away with it, either. He would say things like, ‘Well, that’s just your opinion, Mr. Hale’ or ‘I forgot that you’re always right, _Mr. Hale_.’ God, that turned me on. I always loved the fact that he called me out on my bullshit.”

“That is incredibly sexy,” Stiles agreed.

“Mm,” Peter agreed. “I hadn’t thought about that . . . in a long time.”

Stiles glanced over at him. “I’m sorry. I mean. Don’t get mad again, okay?”

Peter sighed and rested more heavily against the pillows. “I’m not angry,” he said. “It hurts to remember, but . . . I thought about what you said. I wouldn’t want to forget.”

Stiles was quiet for a long time. “You never really . . . talked to anyone about this stuff, huh.”

“Who would I have talked to?” Peter asked, arching an eyebrow at the younger man. “The only family I had left was Derek. By the time I was talking to him, he hated me for killing Laura.”

“Yeah, but . . . why did you go off on the vendetta all by yourself?” Stiles sat up, pulling a knee to his chest. “Derek and Laura could have helped you. Hell, you tried to get Derek to help you in the end, so why not start by asking them?”

Peter shrugged. “I didn’t want to ask them for help after they left me. Besides, I don’t recall a lot of rational thought going through my head back then.”

“That’s fair,” Stiles said. “Totally fair. But you know, you’re kind of fucked up.”

Peter gave him a look that was more amused than anything else. “You don’t say.”

“No, I mean, I’m fucked up,” Stiles said. “I’ll acknowledge that. My pack, my friends died, and I’m totally messed up about that, and I’m kind of crippled and stuff, but at least I like . . . _know_ how screwed up I am. And I know that even after the witches are dead, I’m still going to be incredibly screwed up. You somehow convinced yourself that you were totally fine after the others were dead. Like you could just . . . breeze past it without a word, like killing Kate Argent and her lackeys somehow made the loss of your family okay.”

“Excuse me, Dr. Phil,” Peter said, “I don’t recall asking for your opinion on the subject.”

“Hey, I’m telling you this because you seem to honestly not know. You built all these walls around yourself, you became the ‘bad guy’ because that was easier than making things right with Derek and safer than finding a new pack and actually being the sort of alpha that your sister would be proud of.”

Peter sat up abruptly. “I think you want to stop there, Stiles.”

To his surprise, Stiles let it go. He looked away for a few moments, then lay back down. “Sorry,” he said. “I don’t mean to . . . I don’t know what I mean. I just want to be okay someday. Or at least part of me wants that. Part of me is horrified by the idea, but . . . part of me wants it. To be okay. I know Scott would want it. And my dad. They would want that for me.”

Peter said nothing.

“Sometimes I think, maybe when this is over I’ll just leave all this behind,” Stiles continued. “Go back to school. I don’t think I could be a cop, I think I’m too . . . jumpy for that now, but I could maybe get a job in forensics or profiling or something like that. I would like that. Or I could just move somewhere else and be a massage therapist. It was a good job, I liked it.

“But then I think, I could never really leave Beacon Hills behind. It would always be there, lurking, in the back of my brain. So maybe I shouldn’t run from it. Maybe I should stay, keep trying to protect the people here, keep working for the same things Scott worked for. And if I die, well, so be it. Like, I don’t want to die, but I should face the fact that it would be okay if I did.

“And I guess the reason I keep pushing you is because you keep saying I’ll never be okay. Which is maybe because you believe _you’ll_ never be okay. I never would have guessed that about you, not with the way you acted back when we were teenagers. So I’m sorry that I push you, it’s just like . . . it’s like Frodo and Gollum. When Frodo says that he _has_ to believe that Gollum can come back from what the Ring did to him. I have to believe that too.”

Peter was quiet for a long minute, then he said, “I’m sorry, but did you just compare me to Gollum? Because that’s not really the way to make me more likely to talk about this.”

“You’re prettier than Gollum,” Stiles said, with a wiseass grin.

“How encouraging,” Peter said dryly. “I regret letting you know that I was a geek.”

“No, you don’t,” Stiles said. When Peter rolled his eyes, Stiles said, “I want to be okay, Peter. I want _both_ of us to be okay. So when you don’t want to talk, I won’t push, but please let me believe that there’s hope for you.”

“You’re entitled to believe whatever you want,” Peter said, “just as I’m entitled to think that you’re full of shit.”

Stiles shrugged. “I’ll take it,” he said, and crawled out of bed. He took a quick shower and dressed, then headed into the kitchen. Peter joined him about twenty minutes later, as Stiles was microwaving some pre-cooked bacon. He looked out the window as he heard a car door slam. “Someone’s here,” he said.

There were footsteps on the stairs and then a knock on the door moments later. Stiles glanced through the peephole and swallowed hard. “It’s Parrish,” he said, and pulled the door open.

Deputy Parrish’s face was set in an unhappy mask. There were two uniformed officers with him. “Could you step outside, please, sir?” he asked.

“What’s going on, Henry?” Stiles asked, but he took a few steps forward anyway, leaving the apartment.

“Przemyslaw Stilinski,” Parrish said, and he pronounced it all wrong, phonetically, and Peter saw Stiles grimace slightly, “you’re under arrest for murder. Put your hands behind your back.”

“Henry, what – ” Stiles said, and Parrish shook his head a little. Stiles took his cue and fell silent. He looked over his shoulder at Peter, who said nothing as he was led away.

 

~ ~ ~ ~


	11. Chapter 11

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I think this scene with Peter and Melissa is probably one of my favorites. They work surprisingly well together in this fic. ^_^

 

Peter parked the car at a strip mall about two miles away from the McCall house and walked the rest of the way. He glanced over his should as he went into the backyard and knocked on the backdoor. Melissa’s face peered out from behind the curtain a few moments later, and then she cracked the door open. “Where’s Stiles?”

“Under arrest,” Peter said.

Melissa hesitated. She was obviously struggling to come up with some sort of way to verify Peter’s identity, but didn’t know him well enough to think of anything.

“Julie,” Peter said. “That was the name of my nurse in the long-term care ward. Who used your phone to text Scott.”

Melissa let out a breath. Then she opened the door and stood back to let him in. “What are you doing here?”

Peter shrugged. “I’ve got time to kill and nowhere to go, so I figured I would do you the courtesy of coming to update you before you saw it on the news. Also when we were here the other day, you had hazelnut coffee.”

“Really,” Melissa said, unimpressed. She shook her head a little and said, “What the hell, why not. Are you hungry?”

“Our breakfast was interrupted, but I grabbed something on the way here,” Peter said. Melissa shook her head again and went over to the coffee maker.

“Why is Stiles under arrest?” she asked, measuring water into it.

Peter let out a breath. “Stiles has been arrested for the murders of several of the women. Not all of them – we didn’t want the police to look greedy. Just a few that they could conclusively link him to. It’s going to be in the news – all over the news, to be accurate.”

Melissa picked up her phone and thumbed at it for a few moments. “Oh,” she said. “You are . . . not wrong.”

Peter glanced over her shoulder to see the headline on the website for the Beacon Hills Tribune. ‘Former sheriff’s son arrested for murder’. He nodded in satisfaction. Melissa noticed, and gave him an inquisitive look. “All according to plan,” he said. “Stiles still has friends at the station. We’ve arranged it all with them. We couldn’t figure out who the last two witches were. They were too careful. We needed to draw them out, and they wouldn’t come out unless they thought Stiles was vulnerable.”

“So you had him arrested to lure them in,” Melissa said, nodding. “They’ll think he’s locked up and weaponless, but in reality he’s waiting for them.”

“Mm hm,” Peter said. “I won’t bore you with details, but that’s the general idea.”

“Shouldn’t you be there with him?”

“The witches won’t move until after sunset,” Peter said. “I could wait at the station all day, but there are too many people there who don’t know what’s going on, and we would risk blowing Stiles’ cover. The witches may find a way to check on him during the day. Parrish has arranged for the station to be empty after nightfall.”

“You got Henry in on it, huh?” Melissa asked. “Actually I’m not too surprised. He was always a favorite of Tom’s. Looked up to him.”

Peter nodded a little. “They arrested him a little earlier than expected, but I assume they had their reasons. And the more time there is for the witches to find out about it, the better. If they don’t make their move tonight, things could get awkward detaining him tomorrow.”

“Won’t it be awkward anyway? If he’s been officially arrested and it’s all over the press? Jesus,” Melissa said, pushing a hand through her hair, “he’ll never get a decent job again.”

With a shrug, Peter said, “Well, the first thing to remember is that Stiles gives no fucks about that. His reputation being ruined, his future – none of that matters to him.” He gave Melissa a look as she let out a heavy sigh. “But I don’t think it’s as dire as you’re making it out to be. They’ll release him tomorrow, saying that they didn’t have enough evidence, or maybe that he was framed. The story will fade. People here – most of them will know that there was probably some reason, and you’d better believe they’ll notice when the murders stop and they can start going out at night again. They’ll put two and two together. And if he leaves Beacon Hills someday and tries to go into law enforcement or some such? He’s not required to disclose arrests. Only convictions. And there won’t be any.”

Melissa nodded slowly. “Well, I’m glad you thought about that, even if he obviously didn’t.”

“I always think things through,” Peter said, “even when they don’t or shouldn’t matter. It’s a compulsion.”

“Well,” Melissa said, as the coffee machine began to burble, “I appreciate the update.”

They stood in awkward silence for a few minutes.

“Peter,” Melissa finally said, “why are you here? Why aren’t you at Stiles’ apartment, or a hotel somewhere?”

Peter looked away. “I suppose the waiting was getting to me. As you said. I’m not good at waiting. I needed to move, and . . .”

“And you didn’t want to be alone,” Melissa said. She sounded surprised, but somehow managed to be startled in a way that didn’t make Peter automatically bristle. “You’re actually worried about him. What’s going to happen tonight . . . is it that dangerous?”

“I’m not worried about tonight,” Peter said. “Either it will work or it won’t. He’ll live or he’ll die. It’s . . . tomorrow that worries me. I don’t know that he’s ready yet. And this is one part I can’t help him with. The circumstances after I finished my vendetta were . . . different.”

“I’m worried about it, too,” Melissa said. She turned away, pouring them both a cup of coffee. “I know that he’s focused everything on this. I don’t know what he’ll do when it’s over. Part of me thinks . . . if he wants to go, maybe it’s better if I let him. If I tell him that it’s okay. But most of me just doesn’t want to lose him.”

“I don’t know if he’ll ever be all right,” Peter said.

Melissa studied him for a long minute. “Does that matter to you?”

Peter accepted the mug of coffee she handed him and wondered why he was telling Melissa any of this. “Until Stiles showed up on my doorstep, I would have said that I was content with my life. That it was the best I could hope for, given . . . what I became after the fire. The last few weeks with Stiles have made me realize that maybe it could be more than that. That I’m thinking about this in a ‘he might be okay someday’ sort of way, which made me realize that I’m not okay myself.”

“How so?” Melissa asked, just to keep him talking.

“I’ve always been a bastard, you know,” Peter said, his tone matter-of-fact. “I’m a self-centered, arrogant, power-hungry prick. I’m okay with that and I always have been. But being with Stiles made me remember . . . there was a time when I knew what it was like to love someone besides myself.”

Melissa surprised him then by reaching out to grasp his hands. “You lost your family, Peter. That must have been hard, even for a self-centered prick. It’s natural that you would have closed yourself off so you wouldn’t be hurt again.”

“That sounds so . . . gushy,” Peter mused. “So unlike me.”

“True,” Melissa allowed, “but for some reason you’re sitting at my kitchen table telling me about how you’re worried for Stiles, so I think the point stands.”

“I want him to be all right,” Peter said, “because I don’t think I can be all right without him.”

“Well,” Melissa said, “at least you still have the self-centered part down pat. So I don’t think you have to worry about having changed _too_ much.”

Peter narrowed his eyes at her, then lifted his coffee mug in a salute. “As Stiles would say, ‘no lies detected’.”

Melissa smiled at him. “How about a game of Scrabble?”

“Sure,” Peter said.

 

~ ~ ~ ~

 

Parrish let Peter in through the back door of the station at about half-past six. He glanced nervously over Peter’s shoulder as he did so. “I don’t like you being here,” he said, his voice tight and angry. “If Stiles hadn’t insisted, I’d have you in an actual cell. I don’t know everything you’re responsible for in this town, but I know enough of it.”

Peter smiled at him. “Are you done?”

Parrish’s jaw tightened and he shut the door behind Peter. “Everyone on the night shift knows the plan. They’re clearing out within the next half hour. Gina will bring the radio with her so she can answer any calls – not that _you_ care what happens to the citizens of Beacon Hills, I suppose.” He waited, but Peter didn’t rise to the bait. “Make sure you clean up after yourselves.”

“Sir, yes, sir,” Peter said, trying not to look as amused as he felt. “Where’s Stiles?”

“Still in holding. Don’t let him out until everyone is gone.” Parrish pressed a keycard into his hand. “Good for one cell only.”

“You know, I really don’t have any plan to commandeer the Beacon Hills’ sheriff’s station and transform it into a wretched hive of scum and villainy.”

“Good,” Parrish retorted. “Keep it that way.”

Peter shook his head slightly and headed for the break room. He poured himself a cup of coffee. It was cold, stale, and burnt. He made a face and dumped it in the sink. The refrigerators had some sodas, so he got one of those instead. Then he sat at the table and played with his phone until the station was silent. He could only hear two beating hearts – his own and Stiles’.

He went to the holding cells in the back and slid the keycard through the slot. Stiles emerged from the room a few moments later. “I’m _so bored_ ,” he moaned. “I’ve seriously been in there all day, what the hell. Why did he have to arrest me at half past nine in the morning?”

“Probably because he’s pissed as hell about all of this,” Peter said.

“Fair enough,” Stiles said. He rubbed his hands together. “Okay, give me the goods.”

Stiles hadn’t precisely been unarmed all day, but Parrish hadn’t wanted to let him carry his larger weapons like his baseball bat or his shotgun. Such things would surely be noticed by, well, anyone who happened to look into his cell. And since it was vital that Stiles appear to have been actually arrested, all he had had to protect him all day was his two knives. They had both been comfortable with that. The odds that the witches would attack during daylight were very slim.

The witches would certainly notice as soon as they stepped foot into the building that there were no police officers there. Peter’s job, therefore, was to wait at the front and close the door after them. Stiles would be waiting behind the desk where the clerk usually sat.

But in the meantime, they went around the station, setting up booby traps that they hadn’t been able to do during the day while the building was still occupied. Trip wires leading to loaded guns, small explosives that they had spent the previous day putting together. Peter had been pleased to learn that self-igniting Molotov cocktails were the least of what Stiles had learned to do about the years. But they had several of those, too, rigged on top of doorways so they would drop on the witches when they went through them.

“The world’s deadliest game of hide-and-go-seek,” Stiles said, carefully balancing one of said cocktails.

“It’s no wonder Parrish is pissed,” Peter said, amused. He glanced up as he heard a car. “I think this is them.”

Stiles nodded, the humor gone out of his eyes. The two of them jogged up to the front of the station. The blinds were already drawn. Stiles crouched down behind the desk, and Peter stood where he would be hidden by the door when it opened. He closed his eyes, listening. “Three heartbeats,” he said. “They’re all here.”

They weren’t sure if the witches would come in through the front or not, but the rest of the doors were all locked. Peter suspected that they would come in like normal and planned to either bewitch the desk clerk or simply remove them. They obviously wouldn’t let anyone stand between them and Stiles. In theory, they shouldn’t find anything unusual about the other doors being locked if they tried them. A police station should be secure.

But they didn’t try them. The front door of the station swung open and the three witches came in. Peter waited as they took one step, two – and then the witch in front realized that nobody was at the desk. She stopped so abruptly that the one behind her nearly walked into her. Peter slammed the door shut and tore the doorknob off with a wrench of his hand.

They spun around to face him, and one of them even got a spell started, but Stiles popped up moments later like some sort of demented jack-in-the-box. “Surprise, bitches,” he said, and threw two of the Molotov cocktails down right at their feet.

The wave of heat was incredible, and Peter dove to one side to get away from it. He felt the witch’s spell hit him as went through the office door that they had left un-booby-trapped specifically for his escape and kicked it shut. He could hear the women screaming behind them. Stiles darted down the station hallway and vanished into another room.

The fire was out moments later, and Peter still heard three heartbeats. It was a shame, but not unexpected. He shook his head a little, trying to regain his bearings. The spell had been like a bright light in his eyes. He couldn’t see very well; everything was blurry and pulsing in and out. That was fine. He had his ears and his nose, and in this sort of situation, they would help him better anyway. He shifted, using his added bulk as the alpha to smash back through the door. Parrish probably wouldn’t be thrilled. Then he followed the heartbeats down the hall. He kept his eyes closed so the warped images he saw wouldn’t distract him.

He heard a gunshot from somewhere to his right, and a woman’s cry of pain. One of the trip wires had worked. A door slammed. Peter found that he was actually smiling. The world’s deadliest game of hide-and-go-seek, Stiles had said. It _was_ a game, and they were winning.

“Marco!” he heard Stiles shout from somewhere else in the statement. There was silence and then he called out, “You’re supposed to say polo now, bitch!”

Peter gave a snort and continued to prowl down the hallway. He could smell someone up ahead of him, hear the rapid heartbeat. He tried opening his eyes, but he was still dazzled by the spell, so he decided to keep them shut. From the direction of the holding cells, he heard a muffled explosion. None of the explosives they had planted were big, as they didn’t want to destroy the police station, but they were big enough to knock a person backwards and throw them for a loop. He began to run in that direction.

When he got to that room, it was empty. Unfortunately, the explosives had dampened his hearing somewhat, but he didn’t hear any footsteps or heartbeats. He could smell the sulfur and soot from the explosives, but nobody was there.

Just as he turned to go, he heard a heartbeat behind him. He reached toward it, using the sound of it to orient himself to his target, and grabbed upwards, aiming for a throat or shoulder. He caught one and shoved the person up against the wall, and Stiles choked out, “Peter, it’s me!”

Peter’s grip tightened on the younger man’s shoulder and said, “I can’t see very well right now.”

“Yeah, that spell they got off was like a flashbang,” Stiles agreed. “Uh . . .  you can let me go now.”

Peter sniffed. He couldn’t smell anything past the explosion, couldn’t confirm that this was really Stiles and not the witch using some spell. He didn’t know what made him suspicious. Did he truly know Stiles so well at this point that even the slightest change in the tenor of his voice was something that he would notice? He thought of Melissa and her questions whenever they came to her door. “What’s your name?”

“Uh – what?” Stiles asked, completely flummoxed by this question. “Why are you - ?”

“Say it,” Peter said, his hand tightening like a vise. “Say your name.”

“It – it’s Przme – ”

But it was wrong, it was all wrong, the ‘pr’ at the beginning wasn’t pronounced like a ‘pr’, and before the witch had time to continue to say it wrong, Peter’s claws had torn across her throat. Blood went everywhere, and it didn’t smell like Stiles’ blood, she couldn’t fake _that_ but Peter knew the scent by now. He let her go and she dropped to her knees, then fell face-first onto the floor.

From somewhere else in the station, he heard the muffled roar of Stiles’ shotgun. He wasted no time on the dead body of the witch he had dealt with and opened his eyes again. His vision was still a little blurry, but better, so he used it, jogging down the corridor to the sheriff’s office. Stiles had started on the desk, from the look of the Stiles-shaped dent in the wall beyond it. He was just struggling to his feet as Peter got to the door.

“Behind you,” he choked out, before Peter felt the jolt of electricity go through him. Not even a taser, but pure, unfiltered lightning. He dropped to the ground, feeling his limbs shake and spasm, unable to control them. The witch stepped over him, uncaring. She was strong, Peter thought, one of the priestesses. Stiles fired the shotgun at her again, but she just waved a negligent hand and the shells parted around her like the Red Sea.

“Well,” she said, her voice a low purr, and out of the corner of his eye, Peter saw Stiles rise up off the ground, his body splayed out and unable to move. The witch made a beckoning gesture with one hand, and he floated towards her. His face was contorted with fear and rage and mindless struggle. “It’s nice to meet you at least, Stiles. You’ve done quite a number on my coven, but do you know what? That’s perfectly all right with me. The fewer people I have to share the power of the Nemeton with, the happier I am.”

She uncurled one hand, and more lightning came from it, the bolts small and strangely delicate looking. They struck Stiles in the middle of his chest, and he screamed, his entire body jerking and twitching. Peter tried to get up, but the witch stepped in the small of his back, and her weight was like a ton of earth being piled on top of him, like being buried alive. He couldn’t move. He could barely breathe.

“Of course, you know we can’t kill you,” the witch said, letting the electric currents flow out of her hand and over Stiles’ body. He choked out another cry of pain, and she beckoned again. He drifted closer to her. “Not yet, at least. But I don’t need to make you tell me where the nemeton is. I can just follow you back to it. It’s healing you even as we speak, did you know that? That’s how strong your connection to it is. All we needed was you.”

“Piss off,” Stiles wheezed.

“Your bravado won’t get you anywhere here,” the witch said, with a careless shrug. “I don’t need to make you talk. I don’t care if you scream or if you’re defiant. I just need the trail to follow.” A cruel smile curved her lips. “But I _do_ enjoy watching you in pain, after what you’ve done. I didn’t care for some of the girls, but some of them . . . well. This is nice.” She had pulled Stiles all the way to her now and was watching his body pulse and shudder with delight in her eyes. “I think I’ll keep you alive for a long, long time, and I – ”

Her words were cut off when Stiles abruptly broke free of her spell and plunged both his knives down into her chest. She screamed and reeled backwards. Stiles fell to the ground with a thump, but he didn’t stop moving. He scrambled over to where she was trying to get up, grabbing her by the hair and pulling her back.

“You think you can stop me with _pain_?” Stiles asked, his voice contorted with rage. “Do you even know what I’ve gone through? For you, that much pain would shatter your world. For me . . . it was just another day.”

“Let me go!” she screamed, and then Stiles got his forearm locked around her throat. She kicked and clawed desperately, choked out another plea, but Stiles wouldn’t budge an inch. Her face started to turn red, then purple. Peter could tell she was still trying to stop him with her spell; he could hear the faint crackle of electricity and smell the burning of Stiles’ hair, but the pain wasn’t even slowing him down.

Finally, her body went limp. Stiles scrambled to his feet and grabbed his shotgun. Without hesitation, he put the muzzle at the back of her head and pulled the trigger on both barrels.

Abruptly, Peter felt the spell keeping him down let go. He let out a wheezing gasp of laughter. “That’s going to be difficult to clean up. Parrish is going to be annoyed at you.”

“Parrish can lick me,” Stiles replied.

“I hope not,” Peter said. “I don’t like sloppy seconds.”

Stiles shook his head and extended a hand, helping Peter back to his feet. “Werewolves and electricity are a bad mix, huh.”

“So it would seem,” Peter said. He could feel his body healing the damage, regaining its equilibrium. He jerked around as there was movement in the office door.

The last witch stood there, the last priestess. She didn’t move, though, didn’t attack. She just smiled at them as Stiles fumbled to reload his shotgun, his movements a little uncoordinated after all the voltage he had just taken.

“You know where to find me,” she said, and then her body began to dissolve into smoke. Seconds later, she was gone.

“The nemeton,” Stiles said. He shook his head a little. “Shall we?”

Peter nodded. “Let’s get it done.”

It was a cold night, clear and bright with stars and a nearly-full moon. Peter liked being out in it, even with the chill air biting at his face. They walked through the forest slowly. Stiles was in a lot of pain, although he wasn’t admitting it, and leaning heavily on his crutch. Peter’s injuries were mostly healed, and he gave Stiles the side-eye once or twice, trying to figure out if he should help.

He couldn’t help but wonder what the hell he was doing. Both of the priestesses so far had come within a hair’s breadth of killing him, and it seemed likely that the last one was the most powerful. Going up against witches was always stupid, but witches of this caliber? It was suicide. They didn’t need Stiles alive any longer, not if the remaining priestess had been able to follow the trail back to the nemeton.

It would be smarter to cut and run – smarter for both of them. He had no doubt that Stiles would refuse, and in his shoes Peter knew he wouldn’t have done any differently. But there was no need for both of them to die.

And yet, if he did leave, what then?

What did he really have to live for?

He could return to Los Angeles, reunite with his pack, do his job, live the remainder of his days in relative peace and quiet and safety. There was nothing stopping him. Given how focused Stiles was at the moment, he probably wouldn’t even notice. But that wasn’t what he wanted. When this was over, if they survived, he would go back to LA – but he wouldn’t go alone.

That being settled in his mind, they walked in silence until they reached the nemeton. A figure stood on top of it, turning to see them as they approached. It wasn’t the witch, who was surprisingly petite. This person was taller, well-built, dressed in a T-shirt and jeans. No, it wasn’t the witch at all.

It was Scott.

Peter heard Stiles’ quick intake of breath and saw his knuckles turn white where he was gripping his shotgun. “You are _not_ Scott,” he said to the figure. “Scott is dead. So don’t even try to trick me, you motherfucking bitch.”

‘Scott’ raised his hands in surrender, and as he moved, his figured blurred, shimmered. “Whoa, Stiles,” he said, “I’m dead, yeah, but it’s me. Or it’s my spirit, at least. I’m kind of a ghost right now. She . . . called me back. For today. What a bitch, right?”

Stiles’ breath went in a shaky rush. “No,” he said. “You’re not real.”

“You, uh, you do know that people can come back from the dead under the right circumstances, right?” Scott asked. “I mean, dude, one of them is standing right next to you. It just takes a blood sacrifice and some of the right magic done at the right time.”

Stiles licked his lips nervously. “You . . . you don’t mean . . .”

“It wouldn’t work for the rest of the pack,” Scott said, and his face twisted in sorrow. “Not for . . . for Allison or anybody. Just me. Because I was the alpha, so I . . . she, uh, she might have dug my body up  and stuff.”

“Why?” Stiles choked out.

“Well, because she needs you,” Scott said. “The nemeton – it’s so tightly bound to you that she knew that even if she found it, she wouldn’t be able to use it. She’s going to need you let go of it. And she figured she would need some incentive for you to do that, so . . . she said she would do the spell to raise me back from the dead. All you need is blood. Either the blood of whatever wolf killed me, which, it wasn’t a wolf, so that’s out. Or . . . the blood of the alpha who turned me.”

Peter sucked in a breath. He had barely started to turn when he felt Stiles’ shotgun pressed against the back of his neck. “Don’t,” Stiles said softly. “Don’t move.”

 

~ ~ ~ ~

 


	12. Chapter 12

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Finally, the purpose of all my geeky jokes. ^_^

 

“Stiles,” Peter said slowly.

“Shut up,” Stiles said, and looked back at Scott as he hopped down off the nemeton. His voice trembled, but his hands were steady. He had to swallow hard, but then he started talking again. “Who – how did my mother die?”

“Frontotemporal dementia,” Scott answered.

“And – how old was I?”

“Eight.”

“Who was there when she died?”

“Just you.”

Stiles’ questions were starting to come out more strangled. “What was the last thing she said to me?”

“She said ‘you be good to your dad’,” Scott replied.

Stiles began to sob quietly. “Who was my first kiss?”

“Uh, I don’t remember her name? Geez, that was a long time ago. The blonde girl, the one whose mom was friends with your mom, who Jennifer Blake sacrificed.”

“And who did I lose my virginity to?”

“Terry, one of the guys you went to Jungle with, right?” Scott’s voice gentled. “Stiles, you know it’s me. And I wouldn’t ask you to do this – you _know_ I wouldn’t – I would never ask you to kill an innocent. But this is different. This is just . . . Peter.”

“She planned it all, didn’t she?” Stiles asked. “She planned for me to live. For me to get Peter. So then she could have him here as her blood sacrifice to open up the nemeton’s power, bring you back to get rid of me, and have it all to herself. She used me to kill the rest of her coven.”

“Well, she’s kind of a bitch,” Scott said. “I’m not arguing with that.”

“Stiles,” Peter said again, still quiet. He could still feel the cold steel pressed against the back of his neck. A shotgun blow to the back of the head could kill an alpha. And even if it didn’t, it would certainly take him down long enough for Stiles to finish the job. “Scott wouldn’t want you to do this. Not even to me.”

“I know,” Stiles said. “I know, but . . .” He prodded Peter with the shotgun. “Walk. Get up onto the nemeton.”

Peter took a step forward. Stiles kept the gun pressed against him, guiding his steps. It took a few moments for him to realize that Stiles was nudging him to the side, taking him in a path that curved gently, rather than going straight there. He wasn’t sure why. He thought about Stiles’ words, about what he knew about Stiles. ‘I know,’ Stiles had said. It was a simple logic puzzle. Scott wouldn’t want him to do this, therefore the person in front of them isn’t Scott, no matter how much he knows about Stiles’ life and how well he can imitate the former alpha.

He took another shuffling step forward-sideways. It brought him directly in line between Scott and Stiles.

“Can I just . . . tell you one thing?” Stiles asked, his voice raw and aching.

“Tell me,” Peter said.

“Vatican cameos,” Stiles said, and Peter threw himself to the ground. He heard the gun go off and felt the shells go through the air where his head had just been. They hit ‘Scott’ squarely in his center mass. He stumbled backwards, his form rippling and distorting until the witch stood there in his place.

Before the witch could regain her balance, Stiles grabbed her by the wrist and flung her onto the nemeton’s broad trunk. “You want a blood sacrifice for this old tree?” he hissed, and slammed his knife down into her chest, pinning her there like a butterfly against a board. “You got it, bitch.”

She choked and thrashed, and Stiles pulled the knife free. Blood gushed from her chest, dark and hot, and Stiles held her down until her struggles ceased. It only took a few seconds. The knife had gone right into her heart. Stiles kept her pinned there even though she was still, as the last of her blood seeped into the wood.

The nemeton took on an eerie golden glow. It was the color of sunshine, somehow, in its pure and undiluted form. Stiles looked up at the night sky, his eyes blank and unseeing, as the power washed over and through him. The nemeton accepted the blood sacrifice, took the power of the priestess and made it into something new. Stiles’ entire body was taut like a live wire, and he trembled with it, but he didn’t let go. The glow became so bright that Peter had to shield his eyes.

Gradually, the glow faded. Peter blinked the last of it out of his vision and looked over at where Stiles was still kneeling over the witch’s body. His chest and shoulders heaved with the efforts of his breathing, as if he had just finished running a marathon.

Then, finally, he looked up. Tears were streaming down his cheeks. “It’s done,” he said.

Peter nodded and said, “Elementary is still better.”

Stiles began to laugh. He curled up on the broad trunk and lay there, his body shaking with laughs that were half-sobs. Peter sat down beside him and smoothed down his hair, waiting for the worst of the hysteria to pass.

“I never told Scott who I lost my virginity to,” Stiles finally said, still curled up on the trunk. “It was funny, really – one of those wacky misunderstandings you see on sitcoms. He thought I had slept with this girl in our senior year of high school, and I hadn’t, but – because of the way things were with her boyfriend and my reputation, I just never bothered to tell him otherwise. It didn’t matter.”

“So the witch was just reading the answers out of your head,” Peter said, tracing over Stiles’ cheekbone with his thumb.

Stiles sniffled and nodded. “Yeah. I thought it was Scott – God, I _wanted_ it to be Scott so bad – but I knew it wasn’t Scott. Scott would never have asked me to kill someone for him. Not even you. I mean, Scott let Deucalion walk away. He just . . . that was just the way he was.”

“Well, it’s nice to know that I don’t rank below Deucalion,” Peter mused, and Stiles tried to laugh again, but mostly just cried.

“We need – we need to check on Scott’s grave, okay?” Stiles finally choked out. “To make sure that bitch didn’t disturb it. She was probably just talking shit – she knew that I knew she would need the body to resurrect him, and I doubt she ever had any plans on doing it. But I can’t – I need to know – ”

“All right,” Peter said. Hell, for him it was still early. Barely even nine PM. They had a few hours to kill, although they still had some things to take care of. “Come on. Can you stand?”

Stiles nodded, but Peter had to help him to his feet. “You know,” he said, leaning on Peter heavily, “I bet most people would feel bad, knowing that she had used us to kill the rest of her coven. But I’m still glad they’re dead.”

“Mm,” Peter said. “Well, don’t look at me to set your moral compass. I killed people who had been involved in the fire who hadn’t had any idea what Kate intended, who were innocent in all but the practical sense.” He shrugged a little. “We’ll never know how much the lower-ranking members of the coven did or didn’t know about what the priestesses had planned. Either way, they were still sacrificing innocent members of Beacon Hills, so I doubt anyone will complain about their deaths.”

“That’s right,” Stiles said with a nod. “You’re right.”

In the end, Peter wound up doing most of the clean-up himself. Stiles really wasn’t in the sort of shape to stay on his feet. Peter removed the bodies from the police station, cleaned up the blood, took away all the debris from the explosions and took apart all the remaining booby traps. They buried the bodies in the woods. Someone would probably find them someday, but that wasn’t his concern.

Stiles helped a little with the digging, but he was sinking into an exhausted state of numbness. Peter didn’t push him. He got everything done, put Stiles in the car, and locked up the police station. He left the keys in the place Parrish had designated. He would be by to pick them up at dawn, and by then, Peter planned to be asleep. They swung by the cemetery and found Scott’s grave undisturbed, and then headed back home.

“C’mon, Stiles,” Peter said, coaxing Stiles out of the car and up to his apartment. Stiles leaned on him heavily, past the point of pride. He didn’t talk much as Peter undressed him and got him into bed. He curled up a little, but he didn’t move away from Peter, and in fact pressed himself against the older man when he joined him. Peter took that as a good sign. He kissed Stiles, who didn’t respond, and pulled the blankets over them both.

 

~ ~ ~ ~

 

Peter woke first the next day, and he foresaw another day cooped up in Stiles’ apartment. Although Stiles clearly didn’t want to admit it, he had badly overtaxed himself the previous night. The spell that the first priestess had done had hurt him badly enough that he probably should have been in the hospital. Peter wasn’t stupid enough to tell him to go there, but he thought a day of rest wouldn’t be a bad idea. Then they would start making preparations to leave for Los Angeles.

He nosed at Stiles’ neck and shoulder for a few minutes, but Stiles slept on, undeterred. Peter pouted, but not for long. There would be time for sex later. He thought about waiting until Stiles started to stir on his own, and then waking him with a blowjob. That would be fun.

While he waited, he picked up his phone from off the nightstand and started to thumb through the news. There was nothing there about the events at the station the previous night, nothing about the strange disappearance of three local women. The headline on the second page was ‘former sheriff’s son questioned and released’, with a brief article about how although preliminary evidence had suggested his involvement, he had been cleared of all charges.

He reached over and picked up Stiles’ phone, as well. He had a series of texts from Parrish about the condition they had left the station in. They were less annoyed than they could have been, given the givens. Peter wondered if it would ever come out that the women who had been killed were the ones who had been murdering people, or had been responsible for the explosion at the high school. He supposed it didn’t matter in the long run.

He entertained some idle thoughts while he waited for Stiles to wake, warm and comfortable and feeling absolutely no desire to get out of bed. Would Stiles want to get his own place in Los Angeles? Would he prefer to stay with Peter? Moreover, Peter thought to himself, did he personally have a preference? He liked Stiles, but he was used to having his own space. It would probably be prudent to get Stiles a place of his own. He typed out an e-mail to a colleague of his, someone he worked with when his job involved real estate matters, and asked him to recommend some affordable apartments.

Not that money was an issue, really. Peter made enough at his job that he could easily support both of them, even if Stiles had his own place. Still, he imagined that Stiles would chafe at the idea of being ‘kept’. He would want to get a job, which was fine. Or he might decide to go back to school, like he had talked about, study some sort of law enforcement career. Peter would pay for it either way, and if strings needed to be pulled, well, he excelled at string pulling.

There would be other matters to attend to, as well. He would need to introduce Stiles to the pack, explain to them what Stiles’ role as emissary entailed.

He was still deep in thought when Stiles’ phone rang, startling him. Stiles startled as well, flailing as he rose out of a deep sleep, as he often did. Peter would never admit it, but he found the way Stiles often woke – suddenly and without mercy – to be somewhat endearing. “Do you want me to get it?” Peter asked.

“Nn. I’m ‘wake,” Stiles said, with a huge yawn. He rubbed a hand over his eyes blearily and said, “S’Melissa.” He tapped the screen and said, “Morning . . .”

“Stiles.” Melissa’s voice was tight with – some unidentifiable emotion. Anxiety, perhaps, or some form of pain. “Can you – come down to the hospital?”

“Wha?” Stiles yawned again. “Uh, I guess? What’s up?”

“There’s been – a change in your father’s condition,” Melissa said.

Stiles went pale. “I’ll be right down,” he said, and dropped the phone. Peter winced as he scrambled out of bed, nearly falling when his weight landed on his weak leg. Stiles himself didn’t seem to notice. He was already scrambling into his shirt.

“Stiles, wait,” Peter said, climbing out of bed. “Jesus. You’ve still got blood all over you. You can’t go out like that.”

“Fucking _fuck_ ,” Stiles said, running into the bathroom and turning the shower on. Peter joined him, and helped him hastily clean up and climb into some clothes. He couldn’t help but reflect that the timing was awful. Stiles couldn’t even have one day to celebrate his victory. Peter knew as well as Stiles what ‘a change in his condition’ meant. The former sheriff had started down some sort of decline, and while Stiles wouldn’t visit him when he could avoid it, he would be there for this. He couldn’t not be.

Peter, who had cleaned up the previous night, started the coffee maker while Stiles was frantically dressing himself. He had just poured two mugs into travel cups when Stiles ran out of the bedroom, trying to put on his shoes while he jogged and nearly falling and killing himself. Peter made him slow down and gained himself quite a few dirty looks in doing so, but ignored them. He couldn’t expect Stiles to be rational right now.

“I’m driving,” he said, because he didn’t trust Stiles not to kill them both on the road. But he sped along at a pretty decent clip, watching Stiles as he white-knuckled the hem of his shirt. He parked as close as he could to the long-term care unit, as he certainly remember where it was. Stiles was out of the car before Peter had put it in park, let alone removed the keys from the ignition.

Despite Stiles’ rapid pace, Peter had no trouble keeping up. Stiles was limping heavily, and Peter wanted more than once to just grab him and carry him. He was fairly sure that doing so would only get him slapped, so he refrained.

They reached the door to Stilinski’s hospital room and found it open. Stiles skidded inside. Melissa, who was standing by the bed, looked up at his entrance. So did Tom Stilinski.

It took Peter a moment to process that, to realize its import, that Stiles’ father _looked up_ , looked over at them at their entrance like anyone would, that his bed was somewhat inclined so he was sitting up. Stiles didn’t notice. He was out of breath, and half-gasped, “What, how is he, what’s going on?”

“Stiles,” Tom said, reaching out a hand towards him and confirming Peter’s suspicions about what had happened.

Stiles went completely still, his eyes so wide that Peter could see the whites all the way around his irises. “Dad?” he whispered. “Are you – can you – ”

He couldn’t seem to finish the sentence, but it didn’t matter. “I’m here,” his father said.

Stiles made a strangled little noise and ignored all bounds of propriety and hospital etiquette, climbing up onto his father’s bed so he could bury his face in his father’s shoulder. “Daddy, I missed you,” he sobbed. “I missed you so much.”

Stiles’ father reached up and wrapped his arms around Stiles’ shoulders. The movements were slow and a little stilted, the muscles obviously weak after the long period of disuse, but they were there. Peter looked up as Melissa started to walk towards him. She had obviously been crying for some time, but she was smiling as she wiped the tears off her face.

“There must have been some spell,” Peter said, although he doubted that she really cared about how or why this miracle had occurred. Of course, it made sense. The priestess had wanted Peter there, wanted to sacrifice his alpha blood on the nemeton. So she had induced a similar state in Stiles’ father, to give Stiles the idea. “When we killed her last night, it would have ended.”

Melissa nodded and grabbed a tissue, trying to clean off her face even as she continued to cry. “I’m sorry, I just,” she said, and Peter waved her off. “You can’t even imagine how . . . how much this means to both of us.”

“No,” Peter said, “I suppose I can’t.” There was no way to get his family back. No magic or miracle that would reunite him with his sister or his lost love. He shook his head a little and pushed away the thoughts. “Does his father know? What he did?”

Melissa sighed. “I told him that you and Stiles had been hunting down the witches, but I tried to make it more of a ‘let’s protect Beacon Hills’ thing than a vendetta. But he knows his son. He didn’t seem very surprised. There will be a lot of healing to do for both of them, but . . .”

“But they will heal,” Peter said, and nodded. Stiles couldn’t have his pack, but at least he had his father. He would be all right.

Peter turned to Melissa with his usual charming smile and said, “Well, they’ll probably be at this for a while, and I don’t want to intrude. I’ll be seeing you.”

He turned and left the room without another word.

It was obvious that Stiles wouldn’t be coming back to Los Angeles with him. Not with his father awake and talking. He was going to need a lot of help with his recovery, and Stiles would need to be there for him. Peter couldn’t ask him to do anything else. He had finally gotten his father back. Asking him to leave would just be cruel.

He went back to Stiles’ apartment and got his things together. He doubted Stiles would get around to wondering where he had gone for hours, when he finally recovered from the emotional turmoil, as positive as it was, of his father’s recovery. That was fine. Peter wasn’t particularly worried about it. Stiles understood him. Stiles would know why he had left, would accept that Peter was letting him out of his end of the bargain given the new landscape, would be grateful. That was enough.

Peter got into the car and got on the freeway, putting Beacon Hills behind him.

 

~ ~ ~ ~


	13. Chapter 13

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Welp, I'm pretty happy with how this fic came out. I hope y'all have enjoyed it. Thanks for reading!

 

Peter stopped about halfway back to Los Angeles to e-mail his pack and let them know he was going to be back in town and they were all expected to attend a pack meeting that night. It had been too long since he had seen them, and the bonds that held them together needed to be reaffirmed. They met infrequently enough that nobody complained about having to cancel plans when they were summoned.

In any case, he was glad of the distraction. He didn’t want to spend a night in his apartment by himself, thinking about what he had lost. There was a bar that his pack often frequented. The owner was someone that Peter had helped out of a jam or two, and he made sure nobody bothered them. They drank and played pool and darts. Peter made his rounds among his pack members, exchanging casual touches and scents, reinforcing their bonds with each other.

It was about three o’clock in the morning when he got back to his apartment. He checked his phone for the first time in hours. He had a series of texts from Stiles. Unsurprising, really. ‘Hey where’d you go?’ was the first, about six hours previous. So Stiles had spent the entire day in the hospital, which was unsurprising, and only then realized Peter’s absence. A second text read, ‘are you back at my place’ and a third ‘I really should give you a key to the wards’. But then about forty minutes later, there was another text that just read, ‘are you fucking serious’, which Peter assumed was sent after Stiles got back home and saw that all of Peter’s things were gone.

That was the last text. Peter put his phone aside without responding to any of them and instead went into his e-mail. Several jobs were pending, and he emailed various firms and clients to let them know that he was back in Los Angeles and they would be taken care of in the next few days.

It was several busy days. He had lunch the next day with a client, received some instructions, delivered some bribes and some information, ran a few errands. Persuaded a bail bondsman to let a debt go, convinced a client’s competitor that some business ventures were better let go. He found that getting back into the swing of his normal life was easier than anticipated, and if his sleep was a little more restless than usual, well, that was probably only to be expected.

He found himself staring at the ceiling while in the grips of insomnia a lot. Stiles had neither called nor texted after Peter hadn’t replied to his initial texts. Peter hadn’t expected him to. Stiles, like him, was busy trying to get back to his life. He most likely had a lot to do. Peter watched the news coming out of Beacon Hills for a few days, but there was nothing in there about the witches that they had killed. Things would return to normal, he supposed.

Of course, there was a dangerous power vacuum in Beacon Hills now, but that wasn’t really his problem. Someone would come in to claim the territory that Scott had lost to the witches and the witches had lost to Stiles. Peter hoped that Stiles had enough sense to get the hell out of dodge whenever that happened.

But an idea struck him, and after wrestling with it for a few days, he found himself sitting at his desk late one night, writing a letter. An actual, handwritten letter. They didn’t have e-mail in the rainforests of Brazil. He wasn’t sure how he would get it there, but he knew people who specialized in finding others. Derek had never bothered using a fake identity down there. Peter would find someone who could courier the letter and see it into his hands.

‘Dear Derek:

It’s been a long time since we’ve spoken, and I know that you have no reason to trust me or listen to anything I have to say. But if nothing else, I think this letter is long overdue. I owe you an explanation – and probably an apology or five – for things that happened. You and Cora are still my family, no matter what else happened.

I’m not going to use temporary insanity as an excuse. When everything happened, I was hurting and alone and afraid, but I was sane. I did some things that any sane person wouldn’t understand, but I knew what I was doing and I understood the consequences. I killed Laura for her power, but also because I hated her for abandoning me after the fire. You were young, and you didn’t understand what it meant that she left me, and I never blamed you for that. But Laura decided I was a risk to her, and so she cut me off. After losing my sister and my lover, that hurt in ways that I could never explain. The pain I went through while I was healing would have been both faster and easier if I had had a pack, but I didn’t.

Enough of the past. You need to know that Scott McCall has been killed, along with most of his pack. Only Stiles survived. He’s going to try to hold onto the territory, despite how idiotic that is. I don’t know whether or not you’re an alpha at this point. I haven’t kept track of you closely enough to know. But the territory is yours, if you want it. I hope you can protect it, and protect Stiles.

I’m in Los Angeles if you need me for anything. But I’ll understand if you don’t contact me, and I won’t hold it against you.

I hope this letter finds you and your sister well.

Love,

Uncle Peter’

He re-read the letter, folded it, and slid it into an envelope. He emailed a few of his contacts to see who they recommended to courier the letter, and then sat down on the sofa with a movie. He had just decided to go to bed when there was a knock on the door. He glanced over at it, but didn’t have to say ‘well, who could that be?’ He knew who was at the door, knew it without even having to look.

But he did look, peering through the peephole and letting out a sigh when he saw Stiles standing there. He had almost decided against opening it when Stiles knocked again, and it was clear that he wasn’t going to go away until Peter had answered. He pulled open the door and said, “What do you want, Stiles?”

“You left without saying goodbye,” Stiles said.

“Oh, is that all? Goodbye, then,” Peter said, and started to swing the door shut.

Stiles grabbed it, and Peter could have continued to close it, but probably would have broken the younger man’s fingers. “We had a deal,” he said. “Did you think I would back out?”

“I think you _should_ back out,” Peter said, and the bitterness in his voice surprised even him. “You still have your family, Stiles. Your father is going to need you.”

“Yeah, that’s true,” Stiles said, “but it doesn’t change the fact that I agreed I would be your emissary if you helped me. I know your pack isn’t really traditional, doesn’t spend a lot of time together. I can do both. I can come down here on the weekends and spend the week with my dad. He’s got Melissa to help him, too. It’s a long drive, but I don’t mind.”

“Well, I do,” Peter said. “Go back to Beacon Hills, Stiles. I don’t want you here.”

He shut the door in Stiles’ face.

Stiles rapped on the door again. The noise sounded impatient. “You’re _such a liar_ ,” Stiles shouted at his closed door, and Peter said nothing in reply, although there were certainly things he could say. Starting with the fact that he had always been a liar, and Stiles should really have known better than to trust anything that ever came out of his mouth. “Really?” Stiles said to the door. “ _Really_? You’ve been a self-centered asshole your entire life and you’re going to choose _now_ to try to be a martyr? Are you fucking serious?”

Peter couldn’t let that one slide, obviously, so he yanked the door back open. “I don’t know where you’re getting that from, but – ”

“Shut the hell up, you emotional fuckwit,” Stiles interrupted. “You’re cutting me off because you’re trying to do what’s _best_ for me, and don’t even try to fucking deny it.”

“No!” Peter shouted. “I’m cutting you off because I can’t fucking _stand_ to see you reunited with your father and have it rubbed in my face that I can _never have that_.”

Stiles flinched despite himself. “God, I – I’m sorry, Peter, I didn’t think – ”

“Well, there’s a surprise,” Peter retorted.

Stiles’ jaw clenched down on an angry reply. “I won’t rub it in your face. But I mean to uphold my word. I said I would be your emissary. That means protecting you and your pack, and that’s something that’s important to me. So whether you like it or not, I’m here, and you can’t get rid of me.”

“Oh, I could be rid of you fairly easily,” Peter said, reaching out and putting a hand on Stiles’ cheek, then letting it drift down so his hand was around Stiles’ neck.

He expected Stiles to be angry, but instead Stiles just took him by the wrist, gently pulling Peter’s hand away from his throat. Then he turned it over and pressed a kiss into Peter’s palm.

Peter yanked his hand back as if Stiles’ lips were hot pokers and slammed the door shut.

 

~ ~ ~ ~

 

Stiles was there outside the door for most of the night, and Peter knew it, because he could hear Stiles’ heartbeat. He sat by the door for a little while with his head resting against it, thinking of what Stiles had said to him that one night. ‘I like listening to your heartbeat.’ He hadn’t understood it then, but he did now. It was a little bit soothing, to sit there and listen and know that he wasn’t alone.

He threw in the towel and went to bed at two AM. If Stiles wanted to sit in the hallway all night, that was his business. When he woke up the next morning, he heard nothing outside. He left to get some work done, and Stiles was gone. It should have made him happy, but for some reason it just made him even more angry.

He ate dinner at a deli nearby when he was done with work for the day, and when he came back to his apartment building, he knew Stiles was there. He could smell him in the lobby, in the stairwell. He growled a little and headed up the stairs. He found Stiles just outside his door, not making any effort to get in (although Peter knew exactly how proficient he was with lock picks) but instead making little chalk markings on the floor.

“What are you doing?” Peter asked.

“I’m doing wards for your apartment,” Stiles said, without looking up. “Part of what an emissary does, you know? Helps keep your place of residence safe.”

Peter’s jaw tightened without permission. “I see.”

“You should introduce me to the rest of your pack at some point this weekend,” Stiles said. “I can do wards for their residences as well. General protection spells aren’t a bad idea, either. They can help keep you safe from long distance sorcery.”

Peter rubbed a hand over his face and tried to approach this rationally. “Stiles,” he said, “I appreciate this. That you’re trying to hold up your end of the bargain. But it isn’t necessary. My pack has been fine without an emissary for years. You should go back to Beacon Hills and be with your family.”

“You know,” Stiles said, still not looking up, “has it occurred to you that maybe I actually want to be here with you? And that maybe making decisions for me without consulting me is a dick move?”

“I thought you liked arrogant dicks,” Peter said, unable to help himself.

“True,” Stiles said, finally glancing over and pointing a piece of chalk at him, “which is why I refrained from punching you in the face. But it doesn’t change the fact that I’m not exactly a wilting flower myself, and not the type to sit by passively while you decide what’s going to happen in my life.”

“So I should let you decide what’s going to happen in _my_ life?” Peter said.

“Well, I thought maybe we could discuss it like rational adults, before you shut the door in my face, but since that’s obviously not an option, then I’m just gonna do what I’m gonna do, whether you like it or not.”

Peter folded his arms over his chest. “Okay,” he said, “if you’re so keen to discuss it, let’s discuss. What, exactly, are you shooting for here?”

Stiles stood up and dusted the chalk off the knees of his jeans. “Come back to Beacon Hills with me.”

Peter laughed at the sheer absurdity of the suggestion. Then he saw the look on Stiles’ face. “You’re serious.”

“Yeah,” Stiles said. “Come back with me. I want you there. I got rid of the coven, but I can’t protect Beacon Hills, not by myself. I need a pack – I need an alpha. Beacon Hills used to belong to your family. You used to want to be the alpha of that territory. Don’t you still want that? Don’t you want to come _home_?”

“I think you’re making a mistake here, Stiles.” Peter could feel the old pain of having lost his sister rising in his gut, and he forced it back, but the cutting edge of his tone couldn’t be stopped. “You’re thinking I’m the ‘good guy’.”

“No,” Stiles said. “No, I know who you are. But the good guy couldn’t keep Beacon Hills safe. Maybe the bad guy can.”

Peter shook his head. “I can’t go back there,” he said.

“I won’t make you sit through family dinners with me and my dad – though you would always be welcome,” Stiles said. “We can keep it business, if that’s what you want. We wouldn’t even have to, you know. Have sex. Though, you know, that would be welcome too. I just – ” His voice broke off and he shifted a little. “God, this was the last thing I expected when I came here to find you, but, you know, I like you. Uh. A lot.” He rubbed a hand over his rough buzzcut and gave Peter an unsure smile. “It’s pretty crazy, given all the givens, but I think we could make it work. If that’s what you wanted. But if you’d rather not go there, okay. I won’t – if you’re not ready for a relationship, that’s okay too.”

“I remember a time when you couldn’t say my name without spitting in the dirt,” Peter remarked.

“Well, I remember a time when you ambushed my best friend and turned him into a werewolf without his consent, then tormented him and terrorized him for weeks,” Stiles said. “But I also remember a much more recent time when you risked your life a number of times to help me, even after warning me that you would cut and run at the first sign of danger.”

“You’re impossible, you know that?” Peter asked, and Stiles shrugged. “I suppose this is about you thinking that there’s still ‘hope’ for me.”

“I guess so, yeah,” Stiles said.

Peter walked past him, let himself into his apartment, and shut the door behind him without saying a word. He sat down just inside and just stayed put for a long time, listening to Stiles’ heartbeat and the small scratches of his chalk against the doorframe.

All the scheming he had done to become an alpha again, to take over the territory, he wondered now if he had never really expected to succeed. Because now that what he wanted was in front of him, he didn’t know how to take it. He didn’t know how to be the alpha of his family’s territory; he didn’t know how to make his sister proud. Did what she want even matter? She was dead, after all. She couldn’t judge him.

But it did matter. Talia would want the best for him, but she would also want him to take care of the land that had been in their family for generations. She wouldn’t have blamed him for losing it after everything had happened – but she would be disappointed now, if it was within his grasp but he let some unknown werewolf or witch or monster seize it instead.

What would she say if she were here, Peter wondered while he stared at his ceiling. Would she mock him for his dithering? Would she be understanding of his fear, or disdainful? Would she support him no matter what, or call him an idiot for making the wrong choice? Talia had always understood him, despite anything else. She would look at him and say, “You should do whatever will make you happy, brother. You haven’t been happy in a long time.”

And what about Brandon? They had always talked everything over together. Peter closed his eyes, and for the first time in over a decade, he tried to remember Brandon’s face, conjure up his voice. Dream!Brandon floated in front of him and said, “I would tell you not to be such a fucking coward, _Mr. Hale_. Get your shit together.”

“God, you were always such an ass,” Peter murmured, but for some reason he was smiling. Brandon would want him to do the _right_ thing. He wouldn’t be gentle and understanding like Talia. Brandon wouldn’t want him to leave Stiles by himself, vulnerable and at the center of a power vacuum that would inevitably end in trouble for him. Hell, Brandon would kick his ass for thinking about it. But Brandon had been practical, too. ‘If you can’t, you can’t,’ Brandon would say with a shrug. He had never pushed Peter for more than he could give.

All of this was absolutely useless, because Peter was sure that no matter what choice he made, it was the wrong one and would only end in misery. But the thought of continuing to wile away his years in Los Angeles – that made him cringe. He hadn’t realized it, but he was hiding. He thought of it as caution, but it was cowardice. Not because he was afraid of dying. But because he was afraid of living.

“What was the point of surviving, if you’re not going to live?” dream!Brandon asked him. And Peter didn’t have an answer.

He wanted power, he had always wanted power. Before the fire, if anyone had asked him, he would have said he would take the Beacon Hills territory in a heartbeat if something happened to Talia. The fire had changed him, it had changed all of them. And while everyone else had moved on and rebuilt from the ashes, even Derek, he had remained static. He had thought of revenge as an end-goal. Until Stiles, he hadn’t realized that completing his revenge was only the beginning of his story.

He picked up the letter to Derek and started to rewrite it. The beginning was the same, but he changed the paragraph in the middle.

‘You need to know that Scott McCall has been killed, along with most of his pack. Only Stiles survived. He’s going to try to hold onto the territory, despite how idiotic that is. He’s asked me to come be the alpha of the territory, as would be my familial right. I don’t know if you’re an alpha or not at this point. If you are, or if Cora is for that matter, I would cede the territory to you as Talia’s children. But in the meantime, I’ll be in Beacon Hills, trying to do right by Talia’s legacy.

You and Cora are both welcome to join me there and be a part of my pack. But I’ll understand if you don’t contact me, and I won’t hold it against you.’

He put the pen down and started to pack. A lot of what he had could be replaced, and he intended to keep the apartment in Los Angeles. Work would still bring him to the city a fair amount of the time. He e-mailed his pack to let them know of his decision, saying that they were welcome to join him if they wanted, but nothing was expected from them.

He brought what he needed. His books, his weapons, some of his clothes, the things he felt he couldn’t live without. He packed it all into boxes and suitcases. It took him several hours. By the time he finished, everyone had e-mailed him back. Not surprisingly, most of them had declined his invitation. Two of them said they would look into the possibility of relocating, but that was all. And that was fine. He was an alpha. He could always make more werewolves.

It was nearly midnight when he opened the door, and Stiles was still sitting there, thumbing at his phone. He looked up as Peter opened the door, and smiled when he saw the boxes inside. “Not a word,” Peter told him. “Get your ass in here. We’re not leaving until tomorrow morning. It’s too late to drive.”

Stiles lifted his hands in surrender and came into the apartment. “I’m one hundred percent in favor of you tearing my clothes off, if you’re up for that,” he said. “Just, you know, putting it out there in case you didn’t want to be the one to make the first move.”

Peter gave him a look and ignored the comment. “One condition,” he said.

“Only one? Geez, who are you and what have you done with Peter Hale.”

Peter let that one slide, too. He held up the letter. “For Derek,” he said. “If he’s an alpha now, if he wants the territory, it’s his. I’ll expect you to be his emissary and serve him as faithfully as you did Scott and would me. Same goes for Cora, if she happens to be an alpha.”

Stiles nodded. “Of course. I would even if you hadn’t asked.”

“Good.” Peter set the letter down on top of one of the boxes.

“Just so you know,” Stiles said, casually stripping his shirt off, “last time I talked to them, which was about eight months ago at this point, they were still both betas and neither of them had the faintest intention of becoming an alpha, and they were living in an area where werewolves were pretty scarce. So the odds are slim.”

“That’s what I expected,” Peter said, “but they’re Talia’s children. Beacon Hills belongs to them, if they want it.”

“Gotcha.” Stiles undid his belt.

Peter narrowed his eyes. “Stop taking your clothes off.”

“Why?” Stiles asked, with an innocent smile.”

“Because that’s my job,” Peter said, hooking a finger into Stiles’ belt loop and pulling him closer.

“Oh, well, in that case,” Stiles said, and kissed him. They didn’t even manage to get into the bedroom, but wound up having sex on the floor of Peter’s living room, surrounded by the boxes he had  packed. He thought that was kind of nice, actually. To be in the sort of relationship where they were that hungry for each other.

They lay on the floor in silence for a little while before Peter asked quietly, “How is your father?”

Stiles glanced up at him as if he wasn’t quite sure that Peter really wanted an answer. But then he said, “He’s doing pretty well. He’s going to need a lot of physical and occupational therapy. They think he’ll be in the hospital for about another two weeks, and then he’ll be getting back home. Melissa’s already applied to get some long-term leave. Dad has his pension and workman’s comp, so . . . we’ll get it worked out. I stopped by and saw Josh – my boss at the massage place – and asked him about starting part-time again. As long as I take my painkillers the way I should, I’m okay on my feet for a few hours at a time. Your work is mostly mobile, right?”

“Yeah,” Peter said. “I’ll probably have to come to LA a few days each week, but that’s doable. Redding has a municipal airport, and the flight is only about four hours. Or maybe I’ll do it in longer chunks – one week here, three weeks in Beacon Hills. I’ll get it worked out.”

Stiles nodded a little and closed his eyes. Peter prodded him to his feet and into the bedroom, where he promptly fell straight to sleep. But he was up first the next morning, abusing Peter’s espresso maker. Peter shook his head a little as Stiles made himself a four-shot latte, and settled on a marginally less insane drink.

“Let’s go,” he said, without preamble. Stiles reached for a box, and Peter slapped his hand. “You’re an idiot,” Peter said. “Go wait at the car.”

Stiles stuck his tongue out but did as instructed.

Neither of them spoke again until they had the car loaded and had gotten in.

“I don’t have any idea what I’m doing,” Peter said, staring out the windshield. He couldn’t even believe he was saying this out loud. “I’m . . . a little bit frightened.”

Stiles reached over and grabbed his wrist. “I know. I am, too. But it’s gonna be okay, Peter. I think so, anyway.”

Peter let out a breath. He pulled out of the parking garage and started on the road back to Beacon Hills, and for the first time in years, he knew he was going home.

 

~fin~


End file.
